You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

I had not even thought of running for president until one day in 1991, at a small fund-raiser, completely unanticipated, someone stood up and said, 'Hey, Mario, in all the years we've supported you, we've never heard you talk about the presidency, and we want to know why not.'

I'm not better than other politicians, but I'm different because I got into the game much later in life, after I had raised a family, after I had written a book, after I had been a successful lawyer. It's different when you get into this business after you've led a full life. I don't want to be a big man. I know who I am.

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

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

If I made a mistake in terms of running for president, the mistake was not in refusing to run in '91.

The Catholic Church did not always teach that life begins at conception.

The first good player I watched as a kid was Joe DiMaggio, and that was like ballet. Since then, I played sandlot and college ball and came to understand how difficult it can be.

If I want to run for president, you'll be able to tell.

Nobody has ever gotten a bigger push than Bill Clinton gave to Obama.

Sometimes comforting the afflicted does require afflicting the comfortable.

In 1982, I wrote in my diary that life is motion, not joy. If the way you measure success in life is by how much joy it brings you, you're measuring inaccurately. Life is also sadness, defeat, striving. It is many things.

I will take a draft to the Yankees or to the Mets. A draft for president is not conceivable.

The truth is that beginning in the 1970s, the heart of our Democratic party, America's strong striving middle class, began drifting away from us.

In 1980, in 1984, millions of middle-class Democrats became Reagan Democrats, and more of them drifted toward the Republicans with Bush in 1988.

David Robinson chose to stay at Navy. He talked about commitment, loyalty and values. I wonder how many of us would choose these virtues rather than the chance of becoming a millionaire, especially if you were a college sophomore when you had to make that choice.

People like Pete Peterson, the former secretary of commerce and Blackstone and titan of Wall Street, etc., has been writing books for years about the debt and deficit.

No one in the modern history of this country, no president, has done more to move toward a balanced budget than has President Bill Clinton.

You can't ever make serious progress against terrorism unless you deal with Israel.

There is a respectable body of economic thought that holds that casino gambling is actually economically regressive to a state and a community.

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

Bill Clinton has done more to help the middle class than any leader in decades.

I think - something I learned recently looking up the meaning of ideology. If you look in American encyclopedias, it says, you know, 'Rules for - basic rules for a system of economics or politics.' If you look in the Oxford, it says that, and then it says... 'Despite - and people will hold these propositions despite events.'

The beauty of America is that I don't have to deny my past to affirm my present. No one does. We can love this nation like a parent and still embrace our ancestral home like cherished grandparents.

I wish I were as good a man as my son is.

My parents were immigrants.

America was born in outrageous ambition, so bold as to be improbable. The deprived, the oppressed, the powerless from all over the globe came here with little more than the desire to realize themselves.

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

A lot of my stories about the old days, they're delicious and funny. But every time I recall the early days, it's painful. With every anecdote, it's painful because you're summoning up the terribly, terribly difficult life of my parents. And it's painful because I didn't realize at the time how hard it was for them.

I did once answer the question 'What would you say on your tombstone?' I know what I would say: 'Mario Cuomo, 1932 - dash,' and, 'He tried.' That's it.

There's something about rhetorical violence that is ugly and worrying.