Organized belief in spirituality - that's what a religion is.
— Mario Cuomo
The Catholic Church did not always teach that life begins at conception.
I have no quarrel with people seeing me as a sinner.
In 1984, I gave a speech at Notre Dame titled 'Religious Belief and Public Morality.' I said that Catholic legislators will live by the laws of the church because we want to stay in the club.
I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in fifty years what my father taught me by example in one week.
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 will bring people to their feet as with speeches that bring people to their senses.
I have no plans, and no plans to plan.
Every time I've done something that doesn't feel right, it's ended up not being right.
Religion is extremely important in this democracy - so important that it occupies a prime position in the Bill of Rights.
My parents were immigrants.
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.
The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us.
There are few things more amusing in the world of politics than watching moderate Republicans charging to the right in pursuit of greater glory.
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.
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
I was badly mauled by people in New York State for being against the death penalty for 12 years.
California is an unusual and electric kind of state - it's wonderful. All sorts of things happen there.
The problem is that you can't impose the church's teachings on all Americans as a matter of law.
You want calamities? What about the Ice Age?
I am a trial lawyer. Matilda says that at dinner on a good day I sound like an affidavit.
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.
I said I didn't want to run for president. I didn't ask you to believe me.
