Pessimism is an excuse for not trying and a guarantee to a personal failure.

I think actually that the speech work I do is fine. It's important, because I try to help people think about what's going on and organize their lives accordingly.

When times are tough, constant conflict may be good politics but in the real world, cooperation works better. After all, nobody's right all the time, and a broken clock is right twice a day.

We [Democrats] have got to be strong. When we look weak in a time where people feel insecure, we lose. when people feel uncertain, they'd rather have somebody who's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right.

When I first came to Washington in the 1960s, even at the height of the Vietnam War, until the end there in '68 there was a certain climate of cooperation. And then in the late sixties and in through the seventies, politics began getting more mean. And then from the eighties on it seemed to be institutionalized, this personal attack business. And I just hate it.

He was a martyr of peace but was the victim of hate. If people can't let go of the hatred of their enemies they risk sowing the seeds of hate among themselves.

Promising too much can be as cruel as caring too little.