Quotes from William M. Daley

Politics is all about relationships, people. A lot of it's emotional. It's not rocket science.

When a state offers your company an attractive package of incentives to relocate, you have to look at it, and if it significantly boosts your bottom line, you have to take it or answer to your investors.

The Republican establishment's 2008 embrace of Palin set an irresponsibly low bar. Coincidence or not, a batch of nonsense-spewing, hard-right candidates quickly followed, often to disastrous effect.

In my opinion, it is not in our interest to have complicated negotiations with a region, and then have to follow it up with 535 negotiations at home. I have experienced recounts, and it is better to vote once.

Centrist voters typically decide general elections, so hard-left or hard-right platforms don't help.

Most people who talk about either entitlement cuts or revenue - when you have to put pen to paper, it is much more difficult.

I was Al Gore's campaign chairman in 2000, when he won a half-million more votes than George W. Bush but lost the presidency.

Commerce was the best job I could ever have.

The Microsoft actions announced today are exactly the kinds of industry initiatives we need. Microsoft is using its resources to bring real privacy protection to Internet users by creating incentives for more websites to provide strong privacy protection.

Business leaders should show what our political leaders seem to lack - that is, a common-sense view of the times.

The mistake we made in the 1990s was overestimating the potential of NAFTA's positive impact.

Contrary to what most people think, there is a Rich Daley under Mayor Daley.

Now that Donald Trump has won the presidency despite losing the popular vote, there's a growing cry to rethink, or even abolish, the electoral college. This would be a mistake.

Trump is a different politician. He was a different businessman. His campaign was different. What you saw in his campaign is what you're going to see in his presidency.

President Obama came into office in '08 with the belief that - and the public's belief in him - that he was moderate, that he wasn't a big spender.

When the manufacturing decline began in earnest in 2001, the main culprits were the offshoring of jobs to China, with which we have no trade deal, and automation.

There is no room for politics in the Commerce Department.

There is no path to middle-class prosperity without tearing down barriers to American exports.

Sanders insists the party adopt 'the most progressive platform ever passed' at its Philadelphia convention. Since when does the runner-up get to dictate the platform?

It's been proven in Washington: It's very hard to negotiate and try to get a deal done in public.

Illinois needs a real strategy for job creation that grows the economy over the long term with high-wage jobs that rebuild the middle class.

If anything, the Democrats' salvation may lie in the fact that Republicans seem even more hell-bent on allowing their radical wing to drag the party away from the center.

It sounds good to say, 'We're going to do this,' on C-SPAN, but try to do that in real life, and it's not going to work.

There are some who want to move us back to the days when we were protectionists and keep all goods off our shores.