Lawrence O'Donnell
I tend not to look at Twitter in the morning; I try to force myself not to, for time management. I'll look at it on the way to work.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Medical
I spent a few years after college as a Boston public school teacher and I loved it. But I was never committed to it, committed to it as a career.Collection: Teacher
Henry Kissinger spent years negotiating the terms of our surrender there and ended up with a deal that he could have gotten on the first day he went to work in the Nixon White House - the Americans leave and North Vietnam wins.
Being American means you never have to say you surrender.
Practically, every defense lawyer knows that the jury desperately wants to hear from the defendant and that the only reason not to put him on the stand is that he is soooo guilty that every answer he gives after his name will eradicate any shred of reasonable doubt.
Publicly, defense lawyers cling to the text book theory that the defendant has no burden of proof and that no negative inference should ever be taken when a defendant doesn't defend himself on the witness stand.
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.
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.
At 'The West Wing,' I cast newscasters, and when you put out a casting call for actors, half of the people who come in are real local L.A. newscasters. Each time, I ended up hiring one of them, because they're better at it. Big surprise! A newscaster is better at playing a newscaster than an actor is.
To expose a first draft to anyone's ears other than your own is indecent.
All writers are forced to live within deadlines, and deadlines determine how good they can be.
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.
NBC has created a monster and it is called Donald Trump.
I've never done anything that I need to be doing tomorrow. If someone says, 'We no longer want you here,' I won't show up again. It was true at 'The West Wing.' It was true in the Senate.
I've lived a life of unplanned freelance employment.
It's hard to get me outraged.
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.
Show business comes with wonderfully long vacations, like the life of a college professor.
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.
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.
I've never designed anything in my life to accommodate MSNBC. I've had to squeeze it in.
Bill O'Reilly is a socialist. He is in favor of Medicare, he is in favor of Social Security. Those are socialist programs.
Anything anyone wants to say about me is fair. There's not a single thing that any viewer has ever said about anything I do on television that has bothered me in the least. And every single person has the right to hate whoever they want to hate on television, whether it be singers, actors, pundits. That's the deal.
Teachers who have committed their lives to the classroom deserve better than our politics has given them.
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.
Never once has Republican world said hey, maybe we should look into how police officers are carrying out their solemn public responsibility to serve and protect. No - no right wing website in America is investigating or will ever investigate how well police officers do their jobs.
Shepard Smith has frequently been the lone voice of reason on Fox News.
I'm a very slow writer.
I don't think Republicans are evil. I think they mostly have a different philosophy of government than I do.
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.
I can be as crazy as anybody and go over lines I should not go over.
I always knew I'd be leaving government someday. I just didn't know when. There was something about knowing that it was temporary that left me in writerly observational mode.
The George Wallace campaign in 1968 was the model for the Trump campaign in 2016.
If a reader comes across a story that makes them cry, you can be sure that the writer felt every single thing that makes the reader cry.
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.
Staten Island is set off completely by itself in its own world, and that's one of the fascinating things about it, dramatically.
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.
All men in makeup are playing a part.
I've often wondered what it would have been like if we'd had cable news during the Vietnam War and Watergate.
I discovered, to my surprise, that writing for live television made me a faster writer.
The thing about live TV is that it simply has to be done, there's no space for procrastination.
Every single television product has the ambition to chase ratings, every one of them. Many have other ambitions, for many, ratings are not #1. But my experience on TV, and on the entertainment side, has been entirely ratings-based. When I look at TV I look at ratings. And I never second guess ratings. Never.
Practical European socialists have embraced the idea that the government has a role in healthcare and in supporting strong transportation systems that do not depend entirely on individual motor vehicles. And it turns out we're all socialists now, and there are very few Americans who understand that.
I went to Harvard College, grew up in Boston, and went to high school in Boston.
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 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.'
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.
Liberals amuse me. I am a socialist.
I was an extreme leftist-anarchist. Now, I guess I'm a European socialist who's locked into American citizenship, without complaint.