Rudy Giuliani Quotes

Rudy Giuliani delivers bold, optimistic takes on leadership and crisis that sound like a rallying speech for anyone seeking confidence.

65 quotes

1. It's about time law enforcement got as organized as organized crime.

2. We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for thirty or forty or fifty years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

3. Most of Clinton's policies are very similar to most of mine.

4. I'm pro-choice. I'm pro-gay rights.

5. No, I have not supported that, and I don't see my position on that changing.

6. The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear ultimately. And I don't think we want to speculate on the number of casualties. The effort now has to be to save as many people as possible.

7. I don't need Michael Moore to tell me about September 11.

8. Leaders must be optimists. Their vision was beyond the present and set on a future of real peace and true freedom.

9. In choosing a president, we really don't choose a Republican or Democrat, a conservative or liberal. We choose a leader.

10. There are many qualities that make a great leader but having strong beliefs, being able to stick with them through popular and unpopular times, is the most important characteristic of a great leader.

11. No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough?

12. When you confront a problem, you begin to solve it.

13. The idea of trying to cast blame on President Clinton is just wrong for many, many reasons, not the least of which is I don't think he deserves it.

14. It would be very dangerous to use the military option [against Iran]. It would not be a good thing. But it would be much more dangerous and much worse if they had nuclear weapons.

15. Iraq may get better; Iraq may get worse. We may be successful in Iraq; we may not be. I don't know the answer to that. That's in the hands of other people. But what we do know for sure is the terrorists are going to be at war with us a year, a year and a half from now.

16. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and other terrorist incidents, 'The United States government, then President Clinton, did not respond. Bin Laden declared war on us. We didn't hear it.

17. I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers. I was there working with them. I was there guiding things. I was there bringing people there. But I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I'm one of them.

18. Aspiring dictators sometimes win elections, and elected leaders sometimes govern badly and threaten their neighbors. ... History demonstrates that democracy usually follows good governance, not the reverse.

19. ...the sky's the limit for all Americans if we have the right kind of leadership.

20. We can determine America's future. After all, that's what an election is all about. So let's decide for optimism, not pessimism; for hope, not despair; for strength, not weakness; for victory, not defeat.

21. I never saw myself as any different than another New Yorker, because that's who I was. I was born in Brooklyn and I lived in Queens, and I went to school in the Bronx, and I lived in Manhattan, and I spent a lot of time in Staten Island. So I felt very much a part of the city. And even when people would say to me later, 'You showed great strength,' I would always say, because it's true, that I just reflected the strength of the people of the city.

22. The number of people that put their lives at risk, just totally overwhelmed the evil of the act.

23. Frankly, you have to understand the fact that Rudy Giuliani was a McGovern Democrat, he was endorsed by the Liberal Party when he ran for Mayor. In his heart, he's a Democrat. He's paraded all over this country with Bill Clinton and, in fact, he's very comfortable with Mario Cuomo. But what Rudy Giuliani wants is to be bailed out in the city, in the mess he's in, and everybody understands very clearly in politics that they struck a deal, that Mario's going to continue to be the big spender, save Rudy the options of raising taxes by pouring money statewide into the City of New York and bailing it out.

24. He's basically Goro in a suit.

25. And I just want to say one other thing about Mayor Giuliani: As this began, and if you were like me, and in many respects, God, I hope you're not. But in this one small measure, if you're like me, and you're watching and you're confused and depressed and irritated and angry and full of grief, and you don't know how to behave and you're not sure what to do and you don't really... because we've never been through this before... all you had to do at any moment was watch the Mayor. Watch how this guy behaved. Watch how this guy conducted himself. Watch what this guy did. Listen to what this guy said. Rudolph Giuliani is the personification of courage.

26. And I wanted to say to the mayor of New York all our concern, our admiration for what has been done after this drama, with such an efficiency, very full of clever and heart. I told him that in the French press, when they mention the mayor of New York, they say 'mayor hero' (ph), which is a French expression equivalent to 'Rudy the Rock'.

27. He's the man of the hour, a man whose extraordinary grace under pressure in the days since this devastating attack has led him to be called America's mayor. He's the mayor of New York City, ladies and gentlemen, Rudy Giuliani.

28. Giuliani's performance ensures that he will be remembered as the greatest mayor in the city's history.

29. Giuliani symbolizes the civic contributions that led to New York becoming one of the safest cities in the world, a city where people need no longer fear violence. [...] I believe that he has, through his political efforts, saved more human lives than most people alive today.

30. As Mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani showed how exercising fiscal discipline, including tax cuts, lowers deficits, spurs economic growth, and increases revenue. It is time the rest of the country benefit from a true fiscal conservative leader who gets real results.

31. Rudy Giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days -- like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chavez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a 'stuck pig,' and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn't even bother to conceal the fact that he's had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can't have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who'll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That's Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.

32. Rudy Giuliani is a problem solver with common sense leadership who made a tremendous and positive difference as Mayor of New York, impacting peoples' lives for the better.

33. Rudy Giuliani has shown that he is a true leader. He can and will win the nomination and the presidency. He is America's mayor, and during a period of time of great stress for this country he showed tremendous leadership.

34. Well, among other things, it seems Rudy's a bit of a fibber. Says one thing one, then denies it a few hours later, apparently not familiar with the concept of audio and video recordings.

35. He is a small man in search of a balcony.

36. [He] didn't bring us together, our pain brought us together... We would have come together if Bozo was the mayor.

37. On the one hand, you don't want to disrupt the nation with what might look like a vindictive prosecution, even though it might not be. On the other hand, you want equal justice under the law and if [Hillary Clinton] has violated the law - you know, the FBI never completed the Foundation investigation. That's, as far as I know, that's still an ongoing investigation. They completed the e-mail investigation, but not the Foundation investigation.

38. We want everyone to prepare themselves for the reality that we are not going to be able to recover significant numbers of people.

39. I'd rather have a genius like Donald Trump running America than someone like Hillary Clinton.

40. The rule is, you can protest all you want. Make all the noise you want. Carry all the signs you want. The minute you throw a rock, you get arrested. The minute you break a window, you get arrested. The minute you break into a store, you get arrested.

41. The way you get through tragedy is to look at the good things in life.

42. I'm looking for a president that'll be like a Ronald Reagan to a Jimmy Carter.

43. There are terrible, terrible memories of September 11th, things that I saw, people that I lost, the devastation, the identification of bodies. I mean, all these memories come back to you at different times. And then the other side of it this tremendous response with the firefighters and the police officers saving people, the rescue workers.

44. You've got to be who you are. You've got to be honest with people. If your views change on something, you've got to be willing to express it.

45. What children need most are the essentials that grandparents provide in abundance. They give unconditional love, kindness, patience, humor, comfort, lessons in life. And, most importantly, cookies.

46. A lot of the people that are poor take advantage of loopholes and pay no taxes.

47. The most visible symbol in New York is the spirit of a free people.

48. God bless every soul that we lost. God bless the families who have to endure that loss, and God guide us to our reunion in heaven, and God bless the United States of America.

49. I know both Secretary [Hillary] Clinton and President [Barack] Obama were very gracious and I respect that a lot in the way they handled it the day after, two days after. But I wish they would says something about it too. Because after all, these are supporters of President Obama and Hillary Clinton and maybe they could say something about this. Really not the right thing in the democracy.

50. My advice would be the same advice that I gave President [George W.] Bush when he won in '04, and, kind of, wasn't followed. I think you go with the things you know you can pass.

51. Now, people have a hard time understanding how taxes work.

52. You have to keep a strong sense of who you really are - and I have a pretty strong sense of myself. It gets me in trouble when I say this, but I don't think of myself as a politician. I've always tried to be honest when communicating with people.

53. Civilization must stand up and combat the current collapse of governance, the rise of violence, and the spread of chaos and fear in many parts of the world.

54. While I was the mayor abortions in New York went down and adoptions went way up, because we worked on adoptions as an alternative, so that there'd be a real choice.

55. She said she thought it [ letter "C"] meant alphabetical order. But nobody bothered to ask did she ever see an "A," a "B," a "D," or an "E." If I were cross-examining her I darn well would have asked her that question.

56. I'm a former federal prosecutor, a former associate attorney general. If I had done that, I'd have been prosecuted. It's a clear violation of 18 United States Code Section 791.What [Hillary Clinton] did were criminal acts. She has displayed the facts.

57. I always felt, and I still feel, that the media doesn't belong in a public official's private life. It's a very difficult balance, because if you are elected to public office, people have a right to know a great deal about you, and the press has an absolute obligation to report all of that. But the reality is that there are times in which the reporting is really happening for almost voyeuristic reasons, in the gossip columns. Maybe half of it is wrong, and half of it is correct, and a lot of it is exaggerated. You've just got to get used to that if you're in public life.

58. Now, do I think the tax code should be simplified? Absolutely. Will Donald Trump do away with things like this? He probably is better positioned than anyone to figure out how to do away with it, because he understands the tax code better than anyone else.

59. I have no objection to the concept of domestic partnership.

60. There's never any guarantee at war.

61. I think Donald Trump's reaching out and supporting John McCain and Kelly Ayotte in particular, and Paul Ryan, who had been critical of him, you know, a couple of days earlier, shows that he has the ability and the understanding to realize that there are going to be disagreements and you've got to be able to reach out to the entire party.

62. When [Donald Trump] talks about a rigged election, he's not talking about the fact that it's going to be rigged at the polls. What he's talking about is 80% to 85% of the media is against him.

63. No time limit in Iraq; stay until we achieve stability.

64. We are more determined than ever to live our lives in freedom.

65. Keep pressure on Iran, because pressure works.