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.
— James Carville
Conservatives literally view it as a kind of a weakness to talk to people other than their own. Nothing would bore me more than to sit around talking and listening to a bunch of liberals all day.
I'm a 'just the facts, ma'am' kind of guy.
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.
My high school job was putting insulation in attics - in Louisiana in the summer. It must have been 95 degrees every day, and the insulation used to get all over me. It was not fun. But I didn't know any different. It wasn't like I was spending summers on Cape Cod.
It's better to be married to someone who hates your politics than someone who hates your momma.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Punditry is like weather forecasting: the winds can shift without warning. I remember when nobody would bet a McDonald's Quarter Pounder that Bill Clinton would win the White House.
I was a little-known political consultant until Bill Clinton made me. When he came upon hard times, I felt it my duty - whatever my personal misgivings - to stick by him.
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.
I think the Democratic Party has the chronic problem of appearing to be weak, of not standing and fighting for what it believes in, not fighting for its own.
I think that America will not trust a party to defend America that isn't willing to defend itself.
The teachings of the Church line up more with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party.
If you didn't have some sense of idealism, then what is there to sustain you?
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.
The thing I love about politics and sports is that there is an end goal - winning - and there are indeed winners and losers.
I grew up in Carville, Louisiana.
I love young people. I identify with them. It never was a goal of mine to grow up.
Democrats cluster in cities, and Republicans don't.
Politics is a messy business, but campaigning prepares you for governing. It prepares you to get hit, stand strong, and, if necessary, hit back.
I always find it offensive when people say God showers riches on you if you're good.
I grew up in a French-dominated Catholic part of the country. I was an altar boy. I went to Catholic school. I have a cousin who is a priest - it's part of my DNA. It's kind of hard to separate me from the church, to try to say where one starts and the other stops.
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.
I had a remarkably happy childhood; whatever scars I have are self-inflicted.
I made the argument that every growing demographic in this country - nonwhite voters, younger people - is trending Democratic. It's a ticking time bomb for the GOP. That's why I felt safe in saying that 'Republicans have no hope of making serious inroads into Democratic advantages in 2010 or likely 2012 or 2014 and so on.'
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.
Drag a $100 bill through a trailer camp and there's no telling what you will find.
Sometimes the right thing gets done for the wrong reason and sometimes, unfortunately, the wrong thing gets done for the right reason.
I was against gay marriage until I realized I didn't have to get one.
Ideologies aren't all that important. What's important is psychology.
No one will ever accuse James Carville of taking himself seriously.
If you want to believe that the government's coming for our guns or that being gay is a choice and a sin or that ObamaCare signals the end of civilization or that cutting taxes for rich people is the path to a better America, that's your choice. I'm never going to believe in any of that.
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.
I always wanted to be a sports broadcaster.
I knew that manual labor wasn't the career for me.
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.
Some comments are within bounds, while some are not. But by whining about every little barb, candidates are trying to win the election through a war of staff resignation attrition, and Americans are losing the ability to distinguish between what is fair game and what is not.
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.
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.
When you run for president, and become president, they just rip you apart. Every facade of privacy that you have is gone. I think everybody believes that, to some extent, you can maintain privacy. And I think in the end, everybody gets proven wrong.
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.
I know a bit about selling books, and you need a good title - a catchy concoction with a little Cajun spice, something that will make folks stop in the aisles, turn away from the Grisham novels and the latest crazy diet fad, and pick up your masterpiece.
I've worked on enough campaigns to know that the most aggrieved candidate rarely emerges victorious.
You know there's nothing a Hill Democrat would rather do than criticize another Democrat. It is their favorite activity. Then they can read about how honorable they are in an Op-Ed piece, how bipartisan.
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.
If you want to be angry at Gore, be angry at him for not fighting harder in Florida.
You have to have sharp elbows if you want to change something.
