James Carville

"Stay focused. Talk about things that’ll matter to the people, you know? It’s the economy, stupid."

"Let me buy a [security] pass … so that they can scan me and and search me and measure my penis, then let me get on the plane."

"John McCain, if you liked the last eight, you are going to love the next four."

"You can call the dogs in, wet the fire, and leave the house. The hunt's over."

"[On Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama] If she gave him one of her cojones, they'd both have two."

"Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic."

"Whenever I hear a campaign talk about a need to energize the base, that's a campaign that's going down the toilet. It's a pretty good indication that they're not eating up any territory, they can't get anybody in the center to support them, they're getting shelled back into their own bunker."

"[Hollywood] hates America."

"Who cares? Sometimes you need rebirth. (On the destruction of America)"

"Washington is a dirty diaper. It's time for a change."

"Hurricane [Katrina] hit the Gulf Coast and destroyed much of the Gulf Coast — that was an act of God … Now what happened to New Orleans, that was a complete failure of the federal government. Complete negligence by the feds."

"I didn’t just experiment with marijuana — if you know what I mean."

"Yeah, I graduated with a 4.0... blood alcohol level."

"Back in 2000 a Republican friend warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we'd lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what? I did vote for Al Gore, he did win, and I'll be damned if all those things didn't come true!"

"Republicans want smaller government for the same reason crooks want fewer cops: it's easier to get away with murder."

"Between Paoli and Penn Hills, Pennsylvania is Alabama without the blacks. They didn't film The Deer Hunter there for nothing -- the state has the second-highest concentration of NRA members, behind Texas."

"Look, if George W. Bush and his Republican cronies walked on water, I'd be the guy out there yelling that they couldn't swim. But don't take it from me: we've now heard it from the military commanders and our intelligence community: George Bush's actions in Iraq have not made us safer. They've done the opposite."

"What I'm suggesting is, stand for yourself, be for something, and the hell with it. Because the hand-wringers and the editorialists and the sigh-and-pontificate crowd will be against you, whatever you do."

"Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find."

"Elections are about fucking your enemies. Winning is about fucking your friends."

"At the beginning of the Clinton administration in the early 1990s, adviser James Carville was stunned at the power the bond market had over the government. If he came back, Carville said: I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody."

"When your opponent is drowning, throw the son of a bitch an anvil."

"Why does a dog lick his dick? Because he can. Why does Congress spend money like that? Because it can."

"Sign on the wall in the 1992 Clinton campaign headquarters : The economy, stupid."

"James Carville was one person I was certain I’d dislike when I sat down to interview him in the early spring of 1996. Carville was a famous partisan. He ran Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign and shamelessly shilled for the Democratic Party. Watching him from afar, Carville struck me as a transparent fraud. What I discovered in talking to him was that James Carville was indeed a fraud, but openly so, in the most honest and genuine way. Over time, Carville wound up one of my favorite people in the world, one of the few friends I’ve gone to repeatedly for serious life advice. I haven’t taken a new job in twenty years without calling him first. James Carville is a genuinely wise man. What a shock that was to discover. Life is full of happy surprises like that, thank God. They more than compensate for the rest."