I said I didn't want to run for president. I didn't ask you to believe me.
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 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.
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.
Religion is extremely important in this democracy - so important that it occupies a prime position in the Bill of Rights.
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 don't ever recall having a political argument with Bob Grant. I've known him a long time. I've always liked him.
The Catholic teaching against murder, for example, is largely the same as our secular laws. But as a law, it obviously has a secular rationale at least as strong as its religious rationale.
California is an unusual and electric kind of state - it's wonderful. All sorts of things happen there.
The Catholic Church did not always teach that life begins at conception.
I guess a psychiatrist would say there's some good to the venting process, but it does also promote an attitude of saying, 'Hey there's nothing wrong with being filled with hate; there's so much of it around.' I don't like that.
In 1962, President Kennedy succeeded in captivating Americans by explaining the advantages of being the first country to reach the moon and the dangers of allowing another nation to beat us there.
Nobody has ever gotten a bigger push than Bill Clinton gave to Obama.
If I made a mistake in terms of running for president, the mistake was not in refusing to run in '91.
I had a chance to go on the Supreme Court of the United States, and my whole family was more disappointed in my deciding not to do that than in my deciding not to run for president - much more.
9/11 occurs, and you're going to rebuild, and after awhile, the memory will be there, but there will be something new there, and different, and functioning, and electric.
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.
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.
Debates are boring.
