Mario Cuomo
American lawyer and New York State Democratic Party politician.
I have no plans, and no plans to plan.
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.
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.
I’d say, “That’s it, Charlie, you’re going to be by yourself for a hundred years.”
Lincoln isn’t a man with ingrown toenails, he’s an idea.
We believe we must be the family of America, recognizing that at the heart of the matter we are bound one to another, that the problems of a retired school teacher in Duluth are our problems; that the future of the child — that the future of the child in Buffalo is our future; that the struggle of a disabled man in Boston to survive and live decently is our struggle; that the hunger of a woman in Little Rock is our hunger; that the failure anywhere to provide what reasonably we might, to avoid pain, is our failure.
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.
Do you blame me, ladies and gentlemen, for being reluctant to deliver to them the message that is traditional on commencement day?
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.
You want calamities? What about the Ice Age? ... God made this world, but didn't complete it.
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.
This freedom is the fundamental strength of our unique experiment in government. In the complex interplay of forces and considerations that go into the making of our laws and policies, its preservation must be a pervasive and dominant concern.
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.
Entertainers and sports figures achieve fame and wealth but find the world empty and dull without the solace and stimulation of drugs.
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.
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.
I am a trial lawyer…. Matilda says that at dinner on a good day I sound like an affidavit.
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?
Almost all Americans accept some religious values as a part of our public life. We are a religious people, many of us descended from ancestors who came here expressly to live their religious faith free from coercion or repression. But we are also a people of many religions, with no established church, who hold different beliefs on many matters.
Our public morality, then — the moral standards we maintain for everyone, not just the ones we insist on in our private lives — depends on a consensus view of right and wrong. The values derived from religious belief will not — and should not — be accepted as part of the public morality unless they are shared by the pluralistic community at large, by consensus.
That those values happen to be religious values does not deny them acceptability as a part of this consensus. But it does not require their acceptability, either.
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.
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.