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.
Right-wingers don't want public education to succeed.
My favorite Saturday, outside any Saturday that Louisiana State University plays football, is the Kentucky Derby.
Like a lot of people, I pray for a sick relative or that kind of thing, but I don't pray to make my next flight connection at the airport. I find prayers before sports contests to be insensitive and kind of demeaning, at least when someone prays to beat the other team or something like that.
The 1980 Republican presidential contest might have been as good a roster of candidates as ever fielded by any party.
To be a contrarian, you've got to be a contrarian against your own people.
My blood's not red or blue - it's brown.
I like being on the side of healthcare consumer.
The thing I love about politics and sports is that there is an end goal - winning - and there are indeed winners and losers.
Momentum has always counted for something, not everything, but it's always perceived as being something that matters in American politics.
If you didn't have some sense of idealism, then what is there to sustain you?
When I was wrong about the 2002 elections, I dumped a garbage can on my head. When my John Kerry prediction didn't pan out in 2004, I smashed an egg on my face.
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.
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.
It's our heritage: we Democrats, we dream a lot.
I love young people. I identify with them. It never was a goal of mine to grow up.
I actually thought Pope Paul VI was the most tragic figure in the modern church, like Lyndon Johnson was a very tragic figure in politics in some ways.
Democratic strategists and operatives should not design a strategy based off today's conditions. They should be setting a strategy for where the trajectory of polling is headed.
When George W. Bush was president, his daddy was raising money for the Bush library. I thought that was fine. When Bob Dole was Majority Leader, Elizabeth Dole was the president of American Red Cross. I didn't say anything.
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.
We don't know each other. Democrats don't know Republicans, Republicans don't know Democrats.
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.
You have to have sharp elbows if you want to change something.
I always find it offensive when people say God showers riches on you if you're good.
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.
When you dehumanize a group, there's lasting consequences because they know that they're being dehumanized.
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.
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.
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.
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 had a remarkably happy childhood; whatever scars I have are self-inflicted.
Bill Clinton is a person who causes a lot of passion both ways about people, and there's certainly a lot of turmoil if you look back at the eight years. But there was a lot of good, too.
What has always made the Clintons great politicians and better people is their unyielding commitment to expanding the middle class for everyone.
I think that America will not trust a party to defend America that isn't willing to defend itself.
Ideologies aren't all that important. What's important is psychology.
I have people ask me if I'm going to convince my daughters to be Democrats, and I say, 'I have yet to convince my daughters to close a door.' I don't how in the world I would ever convince them to be in a political affiliation.
But I'd rather not predict. I'd rather affect.
Most of the stuff I've ever said is pretty insignificant and, by and large, has been said off the cuff and without much thought to the potential consequences.
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.
Politics is a messy business, but campaigning prepares you for governing. It prepares you to get hit, stand strong, and, if necessary, hit back.
Politics is a rough and tumble business, and yet there seems to be an effort by the commentariat to sanitise American politics to some type of high-level Victorian debating society.
There are many Republicans who hardly even know a Democrat. And there are just as many, if not more, Democrats who don't know a Republican.
Honestly, I enjoy nothing more than two Republicans going after each other.
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.
When I was growing up, I always had the dream of being an analyst for a minor league baseball team or something like that.
My populism doesn't extend to my choice of hotels.
I knew that manual labor wasn't the career for me.
I have always respected how Bobby Bowden would go out and challenge any opponent, and he produced some legendary games against the University of Miami and Notre Dame.
Democrats, myself included, tend to respect and value expertise and find that people who have established a record of accuracy and developed a model that's proven to be beneficial over time should be people accorded great deference when they opine on a topic that they have demonstrated past mastery over.
