Cuomo, Mario Matthew(Hamlet on the Hudson)

US lawyer and Democratic politician

governor of New York 1983-1995

delivered keynote address at Democratic National Convention 1984

delivered presidential nominating speech for Bill Clinton 1992

wrote "Reason to Believe" 1995

• "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."
• "You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose."
• "I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example."
• "I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week."
• "I am a trial lawyer. ... Matilda says that at dinner on a good day I sound like an affidavit."