Tip O'Neill Quotes

I like chatting with people. If people ask me a direct question, I give them a direct answer and I feel I've always done that with the press.

I find it so astonishing how poorly a lot of politicians handle negative whatever in the press. You have to just get it all out there. You have to be totally, uncomfortably honest.

PR is premised on truth, trust, and transparency.

When I became press secretary my father sent me a telegram and said, "Tell the truth if you can and if you can't tell the truth, don't tell a lie." That became very difficult to do.

I give thousands of interviews, and I'm probably about as open as anybody in Washington as far as access goes, so I'll continue to do that.

It matters to people that the president tell them the truth.

If I say one thing to the UFC, I say it in an interview. I don't have conflicting stories.

In this digital age, there is no place to hide behind public relations people. This digital age requires leaders to be visible and authentic and to be able to communicate the decisions they've made and why they've made them, to be able to acknowledge when they've made a mistake and to move forward, to engage in the debate.

I would seriously question whether anybody is really foolish enough to really say what they mean. Sometimes I think that civilization as we know it would kind of break down if we all were completely honest.

I find that when you open the door toward openness and transparency, a lot of people will follow you through.

In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end.

Be honest. Be honest with yourself, be honest with, you know, your fellow politicians. This is a rare quality of politicians.

And one of the most important values of Barack Obama is that he will always level with the American people.

It's important to be honest and truthful with your constituents. At the end of the day, we represent them.

If you're a coach, and you don't have trust with players, you've got no chance, and your credibility is zero. And that's why it's so important to tell them the truth. If you have something that you're upset about, tell them the truth. If they're doing something wrong, tell them the truth.

The French people need to have all the facts so they can choose. And I won't be running away from it or hiding from it.

I can't be a hypocrite as a coach because as a player that's what I wanted. I wanted feedback, I wanted communication from the boss. I showed up for work, you can yell at me if you want, but I want input. So that's the kind of coach I want to be.

Be honest, brutally honest. That is what's going to maintain relationships.

What is important is that you're honest with the American people.

You don’t tell the truth just some of the time… The American people deserve the truth all of the time.

By and large, our leaders don’t lie to us.

There’s nothing wrong with a politician saying ‘I don’t know.’ Especially in a disaster there is nothing wrong with saying ‘I don’t know.’

I was instructed let’s put out press releases touting advances and let’s minimize problems because we want the Department of Home Security to be a good news story…. But you have to tell the truth when you are in a job like this.

You didn’t elect me to tell you what you wanted to hear. You elected me to tell you the truth.

We want to live in a country where the leaders have enough respect for us to tell us the truth