The only person that ever stumbles is a guy moving forward. You don't stumble backwards; you stumble forward, and you never stumble when you're stationary. So don't worry about stumbling. Keep pushing it forward.
James Carville
I was against gay marriage until I realized I didn't have to get one.
Sometimes the right thing gets done for the wrong reason and sometimes, unfortunately, the wrong thing gets done for the right reason.
When you become famous, being famous becomes your profession.
Drag a $100 bill through a trailer camp and there's no telling what you will find.
If a statesman is one who looks to the next generation and a politician one who looks to the next election, a political consultant must be one who looks to the next tracking poll.
As Mike Tyson says, everybody has a plan until they get hit in the mouth. The one thing we know about American presidential politics is you're going to get hit in the mouth.
When you dehumanize a group, there's lasting consequences because they know that they're being dehumanized.
Some comments are within bounds, while some are not. But by whining about every little barb, candidates are trying to win the election through a war of staff resignation attrition, and Americans are losing the ability to distinguish between what is fair game and what is not.
During my time as a political strategist, one of the most vexing problems was figuring out why so many people vote against their perceived interests.
The teachings of the Church line up more with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party.
Politics is a messy business, but campaigning prepares you for governing. It prepares you to get hit, stand strong, and, if necessary, hit back.
Punditry is like weather forecasting: the winds can shift without warning. I remember when nobody would bet a McDonald's Quarter Pounder that Bill Clinton would win the White House.
We say there are people who have worked in campaigns who say that they have lost some - and we call those folks operatives, managers, strategists, consultants; and then there are people who work in campaigns and say that they have never lost, and we call them liars.
I think Ralph Nader is the biggest liar in American politics when he said it didn't matter who was president.
When I was sixteen, I borrowed a copy of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' from the mobile library. Democrats and Republicans were standing for very different principles, and I could see which side was going to represent me.
I would describe myself as having a healthy income, but I sure wouldn't describe the son of a postmaster and an encyclopedia saleswoman as upper class, by any stretch of the imagination. I would describe myself as decidedly middle class. I think I'm extremely fortunate.
I believe that loyalty is a cardinal virtue. Nowhere in the world is loyalty so little revered and tittle-tattle so greatly venerated as in Washington.
My populism doesn't extend to my choice of hotels.
Right-wingers don't want public education to succeed.
I always find it offensive when people say God showers riches on you if you're good.
Politics has become the great spectator sport of the United States.
This idea that somehow or another, every idea on its face, because it's an idea, has some validity is ludicrous.
Conservatives literally view it as a kind of a weakness to talk to people other than their own. Nothing would bore me more than to sit around talking and listening to a bunch of liberals all day.
I think the Democratic Party has the chronic problem of appearing to be weak, of not standing and fighting for what it believes in, not fighting for its own.
I was a little-known political consultant until Bill Clinton made me. When he came upon hard times, I felt it my duty - whatever my personal misgivings - to stick by him.
In 1992, the most treasured voter was a voter that would sort of swing back and forth, one that might vote for Republican for president, Democrat for governor. The voter that didn't have that strong of a partisan ID. These were the voters that we targeted.
The 1980 Republican presidential contest might have been as good a roster of candidates as ever fielded by any party.
What has always made the Clintons great politicians and better people is their unyielding commitment to expanding the middle class for everyone.
If you didn't have some sense of idealism, then what is there to sustain you?
Ideologies aren't all that important. What's important is psychology.
You know there's nothing a Hill Democrat would rather do than criticize another Democrat. It is their favorite activity. Then they can read about how honorable they are in an Op-Ed piece, how bipartisan.
The American psyche has not recovered, and likely will not ever fully recover, from the profound and relentless incompetence of George W. Bush's disastrous, multitrillion-dollar war.
My dad was actually a college boxer at L.S.U. and a good one, too. He was the captain of the boxing team.
After all of my years in politics, I've learned that sometimes things that are said are true, and other things that are said are less than true.
You have to have sharp elbows if you want to change something.
I always wanted to be a sports broadcaster.
I tell my students that the single most powerful thing that we have in this country - something that literally harbors no dissent and no questioning - is the all-powerful elite narrative.
I grew up in Carville, Louisiana.
I point out the Democratic party won two world wars and beat the depression, cut out the poverty by two thirds, and was responsible for the same sustained prosperity that we've had in the United States. What the hell do we have to apologize for?
We don't know each other. Democrats don't know Republicans, Republicans don't know Democrats.
We should not run away from religious teachings. We should run to them.
Back when I went to Louisiana State University a million years ago, we got the Baton Rouge paper. But if you wanted to read 'The New York Times' or 'The Wall Street Journal,' you had to go to the reading room of the student union, and you got the edition several days after it had been published, and you had to read it on a wooden stick.
To be a contrarian, you've got to be a contrarian against your own people.
With the all-volunteer military, we, as a society, have become disconnected from our armed forces. And our military, like almost everything else in our country, has been outsourced.
Every day Catholics prove that you can be a good Catholic and a good Democrat and have a different position from the Church on abortion.
I knew that manual labor wasn't the career for me.
I like being on the side of healthcare consumer.
It is undeniably the duty of the opposition party to field a credible slate of candidates for the nation's highest office.
When you run for president, and become president, they just rip you apart. Every facade of privacy that you have is gone. I think everybody believes that, to some extent, you can maintain privacy. And I think in the end, everybody gets proven wrong.
