Politicians From New York City

"Being human is overrated."

"You know, winning Democratic primaries is not a qualification, or a sign, of who can win the general election. If it were, every nominee would win, because every nominee wins Democratic primaries."

"Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn't won any of the significant states -- outside of Illinois? That raises some serious questions about Senator Obama."

"Howard Safir is the reason I gave up 19 years in the [[Wikipedia:United States Marshals Service|[U.S.] Marshals Service]]."

"I don't want anything to do with Howard Safir. If you put my name anywhere in an article about Howard Safir, there will be repercussions."

"He's pond scum, and you can quote me on that."

"Firefighters across the country have no greater friend than Rudy Giuliani. Those of us who have worked with Rudy Giuliani know he has always been a strong and consistent supporter of firefighters and first responders. On September 11th and the days that followed Mayor Giuliani once again demonstrated his commitment to the safety and well being of our firefighters and his respect for their extraordinary courage and sacrifice."

"Mayor Giuliani is a strong and principled leader. I saw firsthand his leadership in helping transform a crime-ridden New York City into the safest large city in our nation, while increasing preparedness by opening the city’s first Office of Emergency Management. He has always shown uncompromising courage in the face of challenges. I am proud to lead First Responders across America who support Rudy for President."

"Howard has a strong ego. He [also] had a very strong desire to be perceived as doing a good job, and that combination worked wonders for us... To this day, they love him for what he did."

"I’ve told Rudy that as long as he returns my phone calls, I’m here to stay. The day he doesn’t, I’m gone."

"He's had a tough life. As is not unusual in Jewish families - if you've ever seen the movie Avalon - I think somebody's cut the turkey on Uncle Louis a few years ago... That doesn't change my view of him when I was young and he was a detective."

"For more than four years it has been my honor and my privilege to serve as the leader of the greatest police department in the world. This organization is made up of police officers, detectives and leaders who every day and every night go out and earn the title New York's Finest, and to have the opportunity to lead them and serve the people of New York City is something I have cherished and will always look back on with pride."

"The renaissance of New York City has been built on a foundation of crime reduction, and for the last four years, Howard Safir has worked tirelessly to increase safety and the quality of life for all New Yorkers. The extent to which he's succeeded—on his watch, crime is down by 38%, and homicide by 44%—is not only remarkable, it's a testament to his skill and dedication. During Howard's tenure, the Department reduced crime by more than it has under any other Police Commissioner. Howard has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in law enforcement. I wish him the best as he begins this new chapter in his life."

"Madam, I may be President of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damn business."

"Men may die, but the fabric of our free institutions remains unshaken."

"I don’t think we had better go into the minute secrets of the campaign, so far as I know them… while I don’t mean to say anything about my birthplace, whether it was in Canada or elsewhere, still, if I should get to going about the secrets of the campaign, there is no saying what I might say to make trouble between now and the 4th of March."

"Experience has shown that the trade of the East is the key to national wealth and influence."

"I trust the time is nigh when, with the universal assent of civilized people, all international differences shall be determined without resort to arms by the benignant processes of civilization."

"The extravagant expenditure of public money is an evil not to be measured by the value of that money to the people who are taxed for it."

"There are very many characteristics which go into making a model civil servant. Prominent among them are probity, industry, good sense, good habits, good temper, patience, order, courtesy, tact, self-reliance, many deference to superior officers, and many consideration for inferiors."

"Indiana was really, I suppose, a Democratic State. It has always been put down in the book as a state that might be carried by a close and careful and perfect organization and a great deal of— [from audience: “soap,” in reference to purchased votes, the word being followed by laughter]. I see reporters here, and therefore I will simply say that everybody showed a great deal of interest in the occasion, and distributed tracts and political documents all through the country."

"Honors to me now are not what they once were."

"The office of the Vice-President is a greater honor than I ever dreamed of attaining."

"What a pleasant lot of fellows they are. What a pity they have so little sense about politics. If they lived North the last one of them would be Republicans."

"While they complain about candidates pandering to special-interest groups, 217 years of this republic have shown that deep down people want candidates who strive to be all things to all men. People say they want office-seekers who are candid, frank, straightforward, genuine, who tell the truth even when it hurts. Who are on the up-and-up, guileless, unartful, undesigning, unequivocal. But nobody has won running on that platform, including Lincoln, FDR and Reagan, and you will be no exception. Voters elect only candidates who are deceptive, duplicitous, bluffers, cunning, crafty and Machiavellian. That's because voters want politicians like themselves. The media agrees. So why are you out of step? Thus, you've botched your campaign. You're going to lose by a landslide. I accuse you of being politically pure, clean, pristine, impeccable and untarnished. Your very presence embarrasses the system because you don't play by the historic rules."

"There was no doubt that the man could talk. At the drop of a hat, Mr. Keyes could deliver a grammatically flawless disquisition on virtually any topic. On the stump, he could wind himself up into a fiery intensity, his body rocking, his brow running with sweat, his fingers jabbing the air, his high-pitched voice trembling with emotion as he called the faithful to do battle against the forces of evil."

"In other words, Alan Keyes was an ideal opponent; all I had to do was keep my mouth shut and start planning my swearing-in ceremony. And yet, as the campaign progressed, I found him getting under my skin in a way that few people ever have. When our paths crossed during the campaign, I often had to suppress the rather uncharitable urge to either taunt him or wring his neck."

"Walter Kasper, a German cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, said: "A democratic state has the duty to respect the will of the people; and it seems clear that, if the majority of the people wants such homosexual unions, the state has a duty to recognize such rights." So if the people of Germany voted tomorrow to renew the Holocaust, would the cardinal say the German state is duty-bound to re-open the death camps? That kind of spurious legalism helped goose-step Germany into Hell in the last century. Do German cardinals now propose to do the same to the Roman Catholic Church in this one? I must assume that Cardinal Kasper would join me in saying, "Forbid it, Almighty God!" He will probably bridle, however, at the temerity of comparing homosexuality to the Holocaust."

"The answer to crime is not gun control, it is law enforcement and self-control."

"The GOP is poised to nominate a candidate whose life could be used to illustrate the deceitfully seductive quality of sin summarized in the phrase "the glamour of evil.""

"You can't build marriage on a foundation of selfish hedonism, because that would be to promise people only roses, and marriage is also thorns."

"It is a vocation, parenting, that is not just all about yourself, because it is all about that future you will never see. It is all about that happiness you will never enjoy. It is all about that person who will grow to a maturity, offering to the world a gift, one element of which may reflect a little contribution from yourself. But long before that gift is finally delivered, you will likely have shuffled off this mortal coil, and not be there to enjoy it. [Parenting] represents the possibility, which in the end is at the heart of the perpetuation of all our human community: the possibility that we will not live for ourselves alone, but will feel a deep and true connection, with a future we will never see, with a progeny we will never meet, but who, in our hearts' imaginations, we contemplate, with a sense of responsibility and obligation. Change the understanding of marriage, and you have changed the understanding of our character in such a way as to break our bond with that future, and to undermine that sense of responsibility."

"Selfish hedonism is not a pejorative. It is a description — an exactly accurate description of what is involved in homosexual relations."

"A Keyes speech on the moral erosion of America is one of those transcendent experiences where you just have to be there. It's hard to explain how he touches the soul of an audience, and saying that he's 'silver-tongued' (as everyone does) only tarnishes the picture by inadequacy."

"I was asked by one of the reports whether or not I would call Mary Cheney a selfish hedonist. I didn't mention her name. See, one of the articles said I had mentioned her. This is not true. I didn't mentioned her. But leave that aside. All I said was, she had come forward as a lesbian, she identifies herself as someone who engages in homosexual sexuality. I have just said that by definition, it involves selfish hedonism. I can't change that. Now, it might be true [that] the argument I've just given is the best argument in support of the Republican plank on gay marriage that I think can be made. There are lots of other arguments that can be added, but, in principle, that's the best one because we need to understand that marriage is procreational sex, not recreational sex. Now, I want to tell you. If my daughter or anybody else engages in behavior that put them under that descriptive label, I will not consent to lie about it, and I will not tell the American people that I support a plank that requires this logic and then exempt my daughter from the logic that it requires."

"I think the most important thing that G. W. Bush has done is what he's done that's good for America: he has stood against this country's enemies. I don't remember on September the 12th that we counted the bodies in terms of who was black and who was white. Thank God that day we remembered that we were all of us Americans — and G. W. Bush has been a president standing against that evil for the sake of all Americans."

"When we surrender moral government to the courts, we have surrendered the very essence of freedom, we have surrendered its only real meaning--and we will not be free again until we get it back."

"Now, you think it's a coincidence that on September 11, 2001, we were struck by terrorists an evil that has at its heart the disregard of innocent human life? We who have for several decades killed not thousands but scores of millions of our own children, in disregard of the principle of innocent human life — I don't think that's a coincidence, I think that's a warning. I don't think that's a coincidence, I think that's a shot across the bow. I think that's a way of Providence telling us, "I love you all; I'd like to give you a chance. Wake up! Would you please wake up?""

"Without the basis in written law, and without the basis in our Constitution ratified by the people, judges can't make laws. And if we accept the notion that their dictates are law, then we have not only submitted to tyranny, we have abandoned a republican form of government."

"We must reject dictatorship in whatever form it takes — and especially when it rears its head in our own midst on the bench."

"The gun control mentality is ruthlessly absurd. It suggests that you pass a law which will bind law-abiding citizens — they won't have access to weapons. Now, we know that criminals, by definition, are people who don't obey laws. Therefore, you can pass all the laws that you want, they will still have access to these weapons, just as they have access to illegal drugs and other things right now. That means you end up with a situation in which the law-abiding folks can't defend themselves, and the crooks have all the guns."

"The Assault Weapons Ban deals with a fictional distinction. You have guns that are exactly the same guns as are banned, in function, that were banned because of the way they look. And you know, that's the whole truth of this policy: it's to make politicians look as if they are doing something, when in point of fact, they are doing nothing."

"If you go down a road that satisfies your personal predilections and relationships and sacrifices the common good of the country, including the elementary institution by which its civilization is sustained, then you're not only derelict in your public duty, you are abandoning your obligation as a human being. And frankly, people throw around words like "crime against humanity", I think that kind of disregard for the God-endowed natural rights of human being is the archetype of all crimes against humanity, and I think we have an entire elite faction that is now committed to committing such a crime against the American people."

"It returns us to the dark ages of human oppression, which America was founded to remove humanity from, and it is the whole point of the push for homosexual marriage and homosexual rights. The aim is not compassion for homosexuals, respect for homosexuals and all of this; the aim in the mind of these hardheaded, calculating, leftist, Communist, totalitarians is to destroy the family and to establish the notion that once you have seized power there is no limit whatsoever to what you can do. If you want to tolerate abuses then those abuses can be imposed upon the people. Once you establish that, the abuses are then not going to be confined to egregious outrages like this; those abuses are going to be committed against the whole society and they will in the end include the murder of the masses as has occurred in all Communist regimes that existed."

"There is a difference between constitutional government and judicial dictatorship. And I think it's time we remembered that our Constitution was not put together in order to establish the sovereignty of the judges, it was framed in order to guarantee the sovereignty of the people."

"The right response when, in the army, you are given an unlawful order, is to refuse that order. The right response of a chief executive in this state and in this nation, when faced with an order by a court that he conscientiously believes violates the constitution he is sworn to respect, is to refuse their order!"

"We're in the midst of the greatest crisis we've ever seen and if we don't stop laughing about it and deal with it, we're going to find ourself in the midst of chaos, confusion and civil war. It's time we started acting like grownups."

"So I'm not even sure that he's President of the United States... neither are many of our military people now, who are going to court to ask the question "Do we have to obey a man who is not qualified under the constitution."

"The person you call 'President Obama" and I frankly refuse to call him that ... at the moment, he is somebody who is kind of an 'alleged usurper' who is alleged to be someone who is occupying that office without constitutional warrant to do so."

"[[Barack Obama|[Barack] Obama]] is a radical communist and I think it is becoming clear. That is what I told people in Illinois and now everybody realizes it is coming true. He is going to destroy this country and we are either going to stop him or the United States of America is going to cease to exist."