James Carville Quotes

Truth is relative. Truth is what you can make the voter believe is the truth. If you're smart enough, truth is what you make the voter think it is. That's why I'm a Democrat. I can make the Democratic voters think whatever I want them to.

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

The voter is basically dumb and lazy. The reason I became a Democratic operative instead of a Republican was because there were more Democrats that didn’t have a clue than there were Republicans.

Drag a $100 bill through a trailer camp and there's no telling what you will find.

If Hillary gave up one of her balls and gave it to Obama, he'd have two.

Don't get mad. Don't get even. Just get elected, then get even.

What's the real difference between Republicans and Democrats? Let me tell ya the real difference ... Republicans will always take on people in the interest of power and good democrats will never fear to take on the power in the interests of people.

I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a 400 basball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.

Winning an argument with your wife is like winning the war with Iraq. Once you win, you're in even more trouble.

You know, back in 2000 a Republican friend of mine 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.

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.

There's a simple doctrine. Outside of a person's love the most sacred thing they can give is their labor. Labor is a very precious thing you have and any time you can combined labor and love you've really made a match.

Never underestimate people.

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

If you say three things, you don't say anything.

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.

When the facts change, you change your mind. I know that is a hard concept for people to get sometimes.

American democracy is really under attack here [Clinton campaign that was hacked]. And the question is how are we and in particular and how are Democrats going to respond to this. We have to understand this is really, really quite extraordinary. And it would seem to me that the FBI shouldn't be getting rolled by the House Republicans and that's what happened here.

Sometimes a mind is like a mouth: you just got to shut it.

Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.

I was against gay marriage until I realized I didn't have to get one.

We should not run away from religious teachings. We should run to them.

The teachings of the Church line up more with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party.

Republicans now have their own network in Fox, so guys who don't like to answer questions, like Trent Lott, have a place to go to hit softballs.

All the wrong people are against it, so it must be right.

Every day Catholics prove that you can be a good Catholic and a good Democrat and have a different position from the Church on abortion.

This is not class warfare, this is generational warfare. This administration and old wealthy people have declared war on young people. That is the real war that is going on here. And that is the war we've got to talk about.

You have to have sharp elbows if you want to change something.

But I'd rather not predict. I'd rather affect.

If you didn't have some sense of idealism, then what is there to sustain you?

You know there's nothing a Hill Democrat would rather do than criticize another Democrat. It is their favorite activity. Then they can read about how honorable they are in an Op-Ed piece, how bipartisan.

Am I surprised that Joe Klein [pseudonymous author of Primary Colors which he denied writing] lied? No, because in my opinion reporters lie all the time.

Ideologies aren't all that important. What's important is psychology.

If you want to be angry at Gore, be angry at him for not fighting harder in Florida.

I think Ralph Nader is the biggest liar in American politics when he said it didn't matter who was president.

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

[Hollywood] hates America.

Sometimes the right thing gets done for the wrong reason and sometimes, unfortunately, the wrong thing gets done for the right reason.

[ James Comey] was acting in concert and coordination with the House Republicans. End of story. He gave a letter to them. They gave it to FOX News. Also, we have this extraordinary case of the KGB being involved in this race and selectively leaking things from the [Hillary] Clinton campaign that they hacked.

They seem to be getting it together. How much damage will the picture of people spending four or five days on rooftops do That depends on how well it goes from here on out.

I've never seen a candidate - I've never seen a human being - who, with the most limited briefing, can understand the dimensions, the parameters, the nuances of everything of any kind of a policy or political problem.

As we know the KGB is all over this election [2016].

You don't need a guidebook to see New Orleans - just a good pair of shoes.

I think the Democratic Party has the chronic problem of appearing to be weak, of not standing and fighting for what it believes in, not fighting for its own.

The only thing I'm running for is the state line.

When you become famous, being famous becomes your profession.

I think this an outrage and I think the fact that the KGB is involved in this election [2016] is an outrage and I think the American people ought to take their democracy back regardless of what the press wants to do and the excuses they want to make for [James] Comey. That's what I think.

We ought to be talking about our democracy being under assault right now and what we're going to do about it and not what somebody said in July about James Comey. That's a distraction, that's not what's going on.

The country feels like it's entitled to abuse this state and forget about us, and we are sick of it.

No one will ever accuse James Carville of taking himself seriously.