Governor Mario Cuomo speaks at the 150th Anniversary of Lincoln's 'Right Makes Might' Speech at the NYU Cooper Union Great Hall on February 25, 2010 in New York City. Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images
News outlets were reporting Thursday night that former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo died just hours after his son Andrew was sworn in for his second term. The senior Cuomo is widely regarded as an orator who gave several memorable addresses during his 12 years as governor. His eloquence with politics and people lives on as the nation mourns his death.
Here are a few of Cuomo's best sound bites, culled from Wikiquote:
"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 sound good as with speeches that are good and sound; not so much with speeches that will bring people to their feet as with speeches that will bring people to their senses." -- Democratic National Convention, 1984
"Every time I've done something that doesn't feel right, it's ended up not being right." -- quoted in Karen Casey's book "In God's Care: Daily Meditations on Spirituality in Recovery," 1991
"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." -- Iona College commencement address, 1984
"You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose." -- in an interview with The New Republic, 1985
"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." -- Iona College commencement address, 1984
"Lincoln isn’t a man with ingrown toenails, he’s an idea." -- in the New York Times, 1986
"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." -- in a speech at the University of Notre Dame, 1984
