Mario Cuomo quotes

Mario Cuomo was an American politician and lawyer, best known for serving as the Governor of New York. His eloquent speeches and progressive values made him a prominent figure in the Democratic Party. He inspired many with his commitment to social justice and public service. Here are 49 of his quotes:

Every time I've done something that doesn't feel right, it's ended up not being right.

Mario Cuomo

I am a trial lawyer.... Matilda says that at dinner on a good day I sound like an affidavit.

Mario Cuomo

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Mario Cuomo

I have no plans, and no plans to plan.

Mario Cuomo

There are few things more amusing in the world of politics than watching moderate Republicans charging to the right in pursuit of greater glory.

Mario Cuomo

The mugger who is arrested is back on the street before the police officer, but the person mugged may not be back on the street for a long time, if ever.

Mario Cuomo

I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week.

Mario Cuomo

I said I didn't want to run for president. I didn't ask you to believe me.

Mario Cuomo

I told them that my grandfather had died in the Great Crash of 1929 - a stockbroker jumped out of a window and crushed him and his pushcart down below.

Mario Cuomo

Entertainers and sports figures achieve fame and wealth but find the world empty and dull without the solace and stimulation of drugs.

Mario Cuomo

People expect Byzantine, Machiavellian logic from politicians. But the truth is simple. Trial lawyers learn a good rule: 'Don't decide what you don't have to decide.

Mario Cuomo

You want calamities? What about the Ice Age? ... God made this world, but didn't complete it.

Mario Cuomo

When you've parked the second car in the garage, and installed the hot tub, and skied in Colorado, and wind-surfed in the Caribbean, when you've had your first love affair and your second and your third, the question will remain, where does the dream end for me?

Mario Cuomo

I think it's already apparent that a good part of this Nation understands - if only instinctively - that anything which seems to suggest that God favors a political party or the establishment of a state church, is wrong and dangerous. Way down deep the American people are afraid of an entangling relationship between formal religions - or whole bodies of religious belief - and government. Apart from constitutional law and religious doctrine, there is a sense that tells us it's wrong to presume to speak for God or to claim God's sanction of our particular legislation and His rejection of all other positions. Most of us are offended when we see religion being trivialized by its appearance in political throw-away pamphlets. The American people need no course in philosophy or political science or church history to know that God should not be made into a celestial party chairman.

Mario Cuomo

We believe as Democrats, that a society as blessed as ours, the most affluent democracy in the world's history, one that can spend trillions on instruments of destruction, ought to be able to help the middle class in its struggle, ought to be able to find work for all who can do it, room at the table, shelter for the homeless, care for the elderly and infirm, and hope for the destitute. And we proclaim as loudly as we can the utter insanity of nuclear proliferation and the need for a nuclear freeze, if only to affirm the simple truth that peace is better than war because life is better than death.

Mario Cuomo

I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant, or non-believer, or as anything else you choose. We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might some day force theirs on us.

Mario Cuomo

Most of us have achieved levels of affluence and comfort unthought of two generations ago. We've never had it so good, most of us. Nor have we ever complained so bitterly about our problems.

Mario Cuomo

I would like to tell them, the graduates, all of this, and I know that if we thought they would not be embarrassed by hearing it, we would all be telling them about how proud we are of them and how much we believe in them and their future. But again maybe we don't have to tell them; maybe they know. Maybe they can tell just by seeing the love in our eyes today.

Mario Cuomo

If he had told the voters in 1980 that truth, would American voters have signed the loan certificate for him on Election Day? Of course not! That was an election won under false pretenses. It was won with smoke and mirrors and illusions. And that's the kind of recovery we have now as well.

Mario Cuomo

Do you blame me, ladies and gentlemen, for being reluctant to deliver to them the message that is traditional on commencement day?

Mario Cuomo

How can we tell our children that - when we have ourselves so often cried out in bitter despair at what we regarded to be the injustice of life - and when we have so often surrendered?

Mario Cuomo

How do we tell them that one not be discouraged by the imperfection of the world and the inevitability of death and diminishment. How do we tell them when they lose a child, or are crippled, or know that they will themselves die too soon - that God permits pain and sickness and unfairness and evil to exist, only in order to permit us to test our mettle and to earn a fulfillment that would otherwise not be possible?

Mario Cuomo