Top 55 Lawrence ODonnell Quotes

I love some of the most hateful tweets. I think they’re very funny. In the negative attacks on me, there are frequently some real displays of humor. I want to reply, but I won’t, because there are all sorts of other people making serious points that I care about, and I don’t want them to be discouraged.

What we’re doing on ‘The West Wing’ is fictional. It’s not a place to learn about politics or government. Has there ever been a fundraiser on ‘The West Wing?’ No. So right there, you’re in Disneyland.

Bill O’Reilly is a socialist. He is in favor of Medicare, he is in favor of Social Security. Those are socialist programs.

I am not a liberal who is so afraid of the word that I had to change my name to progressive.

Everything I ever suggested for ‘The West Wing’ comes from my work with Senator Moynihan.

I’ve never designed anything in my life to accommodate MSNBC. I’ve had to squeeze it in.

Desegregation came very painfully to the Boston schools, long after John Kelly finished high school, and the pain of desegregating Boston schools was visited entirely on the students who looked like Frederica Wilson.

Political talk on TV has degenerated so much. You can say something complex on ‘The West Wing’ and you will not suffer a screaming interruption by three other panelists.

You can be outraged by what the Koch brothers do with their money in politics and you can appreciate what they contribute to hospitals and medical research, and you can do that at the same time and still retain an ability to function.

I majored in economics in college. Certain things were just out, like chemistry or biology, or science or math, that was just out of the question. That’s just an aptitude impossibility, I couldn’t have done it.

NBC has created a monster and it is called Donald Trump.

The worst teacher in America could never do as much damage as the worst police officer in America. But the right wing has never even been slightly curious about evaluating the job performance of police officers.

To expose a first draft to anyone’s ears other than your own is indecent.

There’s times where you can watch television and say, ‘Look at that cheesy thing they’re doing for ratings,’ and you’re right.

I never like the TV or movie Harvard characters. The fact of the matter is that most people who go to Harvard went to public schools and weren’t in final clubs. I didn’t even know that final clubs existed until I was a senior.

There are people who hate me, there are people who like me, and they’re both right. I think people hate me for the right reasons, which is my politics and what they discern to be my personal attitudes.

The George Wallace campaign in 1968 was the model for the Trump campaign in 2016.

I can be as crazy as anybody and go over lines I should not go over.

One of the things that I see on Twitter is that people think they know what you think about things you haven’t discussed.

I’m a very slow writer.

In the summer of 2007, I was in New York for some meetings and… I rented a car and just drove to Staten Island to take a glance and remind myself about it. I ended up staying a couple of days there in a hotel and I’ve been all over the island several times since.

I grew up a few years after John Kelly in an identical neighborhood in the other side of Boston and I went to high school in John Kelly’s neighborhood. I know the neighborhood John Kelly comes from, I know the culture.

People like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been very busy educating America about just how much socialism we have, from Social Security to Medicare to public schools to public universities, and how much we love that. The truth is that there is no pure socialist or capitalist economy on earth.

I don’t trust news sources, and neither should other people. They should use them in the same way that they use medical opinions and get more than one on the important issues. Trust is the most precious thing you could possibly give to another person. But to institutions? Publications?

There’s something about the power of influential correspondents tweeting something that has become the fastest way to get a story moving. It will turn into something much faster and much bigger than it would have.

I’ve never understood the value of putting someone on television to lie, knowing that they’re going to lie ahead of time, knowing that that is their deal: to lie ahead of time. There is zero news value in that.

Roger Ailes’s effect on politics was much longer-lasting than Richard Nixon’s, even though Nixon was elected president twice.

It’s hard to get me outraged.

The First Amendment protects the news media and the news media knows how to use it. Donald Trump doesn’t understand it, he’s never going to understand it.

If in the script there is an argument about gun control, the most precious document you could produce at ‘The West Wing’ that week is a passionate, intelligent case against gun control. We know how to do the other one.

The Trump view of immigration defies our history. Immigration is a transaction that has historically benefited the country.

Every cable news channel was a very big business success before Donald Trump started lying about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. And they were all making more money than they knew what to do with then and more money than Donald Trump has ever seen in his life.

Big city mayors don’t play well with voters outside their city anymore. Just ask John Lindsay, Ed Koch, Kevin White, Tom Bradley, Dick Riordon. Rudy Giuliani is no exception.

The thing about live TV is that it simply has to be done, there’s no space for procrastination.

I have no broadcasting training. No one’s ever said to me, ‘This is how you read a Teleprompter.’ They just pointed to it and said, ‘It’s over there.’

In pre-election polling, momentum is more important than position, and in primary polling, national numbers are useless.

The Republican base – the Evangelical get-out-the-vote troops – are going to be devastated when they discover how many closeted gay Republicans were involved in policing Mark Foley in the House of Representatives.

You don’t immediately adopt the values and the framework of this, the academically successful world, just because okay now you kids get to go to high school.

Successful presidential campaigns follow a two-part strategy. For Republicans, Richard Nixon described it as running to the right in the primaries and running back to the center in the general election. For Democrats, the idea is to go to the left in the primaries, then to the center.

I ended up going to Harvard College, which was about as likely in my neighborhood as going to the moon.

What MSNBC is, what cable news prime time has become in the shows that get the ratings, is the oped page of the newspaper.

Around the courthouse when defense lawyers are chatting about their cases, the only question they ask each other is can you put your guy on the stand? Those conversations always assume the defendant is guilty. The question is just about the degree of difficulty in presenting a defense.

The United States is and will continue to be the most important country in the world, economically, militarily, intellectually. There’s nothing that four years of Trump can do to stop that. What it is no longer, during the Trump years, is the leading source for better governmental arrangements between countries.

There was the slow discovery for me in the early ’80s that Republicans are people too… That Republicans are perfectly reasonable people… and that Republicans can be right about something.

When you get off to an African country like Malawi – which is pretty removed from everything and pretty seriously off the grid – and you see the struggle of life that goes on there, it’s a completely different thing than what happens here.

If you have five weeks to write an episode of television or seven months to write a movie or several years to write a book, each of those things is going to be better than a live television show.

Nothing outrages and disappoints an extremist more than compromise.

No one outside of the Black Caucus would be happy to see Alcee Hastings in a chairmanship. I first saw Alcee Hastings in his impeachment trial in the Senate.

Teachers who have committed their lives to the classroom deserve better than our politics has given them.

If I write a cop show, it’s not up to me to decide how different it is from ‘Law & Order.’ I had screenwriters go on and on and on about how their cop show isn’t like any other cop show on TV. They made very good points, and it absolutely doesn’t matter. It’s entirely up to the audience to decide.

All writers are forced to live within deadlines, and deadlines determine how good they can be.

The great thing about going to Malawi is I have no contact for at least a week with anything that’s happening back in Washington.

Staten Island is set off completely by itself in its own world, and that’s one of the fascinating things about it, dramatically.