Mario Cuomo Quotes

36 Sourced Quotes

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

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
Tell me, ladies and gentlemen, are we the ones to tell them what their instructors have tried to teach them for years? That the philosophers were right.
That Saint Francis, Buddha, Muhammad, Maimonides — all spoke the truth when they said the only way to serve yourself is to serve others; and that Aristotle was right, before them, when he said the only way to assure yourself happiness is to learn to give happiness.

Mario Cuomo
We believe in a single fundamental idea that describes better than most textbooks and any speech that I could write what a proper government should be: the idea of family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another's pain, sharing one another's blessings — reasonably, honestly, fairly, without respect to race, or sex, or geography, or political affiliation.

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

Mario Cuomo
Indeed, as I think about it, I have to conclude that these young people before me today are the best reason for hope that this world knows.

Mario Cuomo
We believe in only the government we need, but we insist on all the government we need.
We believe in a government that is characterized by fairness and reasonableness, a reasonableness that goes beyond labels, that doesn't distort or promise to do things that we know we can't do.
We believe in a government strong enough to use words like "love" and "compassion" and smart enough to convert our noblest aspirations into practical realities.
We believe in encouraging the talented, but we believe that while survival of the fittest may be a good working description of the process of evolution, a government of humans should elevate itself to a higher order.

Mario Cuomo
If you can manipulate news, a judge can manipulate the law. A smart lawyer can keep a killer out of jail, a smart accountant can keep a thief from paying taxes, a smart reporter could ruin your reputation — unfairly.

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

Mario Cuomo
How simple it seems now. We thought the Sermon on the Mount was a nice allegory and nothing more. What we didn't understand until we got to be a little older was that it was the whole answer, the whole truth. That the way — the only way — to succeed and to be happy is to learn those rules so basic that a shepherd's son could teach them to an ignorant flock without notes or formulae.

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
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.
The closed circle of materialism is clear to us now — aspirations become wants, wants become needs, and self-gratification becomes a bottomless pit.
All around us we have seen success in the world's terms become ultimate and desperate failure.

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
I've been taking a closer look at these graduates. They are actually taller, stronger, smarter than we were, smart enough maybe to take our mistakes as their messages, to make our weaknesses their lessons, and to make our example — good and not so good — part of their education.

Mario Cuomo
We must get the American public to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship, to the reality, the hard substance of things. And we'll do it not so much with speeches that sound good as with speeches that are good and sound; not so much with speeches that will bring people to their feet as with speeches that will bring people to their senses.

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
If this country wanted its Supreme Court to reflect the immediate social or political wishes of the people, it would provide for the election of the Court. And if the Founding Fathers had wanted it that way, they could have said so—or at least hinted at it. They did just the opposite: they designed a system that tried to immunize the Court from the changing moods and passions of the people.

Mario Cuomo
Outrage is easy, cheap, and oversold. The nation needs less anger and more thoughtful reflection, less shouting and more listening, less dissembling and more honesty.

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
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
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
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.' That's not evasion, it's wisdom.

Mario Cuomo
Do we have the right now to tell them that when Saint Francis begged the Lord to teach him to want to console instead of seeking to be consoled — to teach him to want to love instead of desiring to be loved — that he was really being selfish? Because he knew the only way to be fulfilled and pleased and happy was to give instead of trying to get.

Mario Cuomo
Lincoln isn't a man with ingrown toenails, he's an idea.

Mario Cuomo
I'd say, That's it, Charlie, you're going to be by yourself for a hundred years.

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
We speak for millions of reasoning people fighting to preserve our environment from greed and from stupidity.

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

Mario Cuomo