David Dinkins Quotes

Well, I think I am a very, very lucky person. I'm very fortunate.

Race relations can be an appropriate issue ... but only if you want to craft solutions, and not catalogue complaints. If we use the issue appropriately, we can transform it from the cancer of our society into the cure.

Children are amazing, and while I go to places like Princeton and Harvard and Yale, and of course I teach at Columbia, NYU, and that's nice and I love students, but the most fun of all are the real little ones, the young ones.

Well, I'm not sure, but of one thing I am certain: History judges one differently than contemporary observers, and so I think that as time passes, I hope that not me personally so much, but our administration will be seen for some of the things that we accomplished.

You can't twist Al Sharpton's arm.

I'm confident that, were I mayor, I would do some things differently than he has. But I think there's a world of difference between him and his immediate predecessor.

There is no point in me worrying about what Bloomberg or Badillo will do.

My mother came here to New York. She and my grandmother were domestics, cooking, cleaning for other people.

We borrowed money, it helped us with bonds and what not, and the Federal Government backed it, but it was a guarantee, it was not a grant. And we not only paid it off, but we paid it off ahead of time.

Some of us claim that New York City is the capital of the country, indeed the capital of the world. Now, that may be a bit much for those who don't come from New York, but clearly we are an important city for reasons of our cultural advantages.

The people really are what make New York City great.

I finished law school in '56, but I was working two jobs.

I love kids and I maintain that they are our future, that we adults owe them the ability to achieve their potential and that we don't own this planet. We hold it in trust for them.

Little has changed in our New York neighborhoods except the faces, the names, and the languages spoken. The same decent values of hard work and accomplishment and service to city and nation still exist.

But the courts have dismissed the lawsuits against me and Lee Brown.

So it's a mistake for someone to think that they bailed New York out. They did assist us, for which we are grateful, but it's a mistake to say we bailed New York out by giving them a grant of money to help those poor people who throw it away on welfare.

We have not always agreed, but I have said repeatedly and publicly many times that Al Sharpton has never counseled violence, but he gets blamed for a whole lot of that.

And, as a matter of fact, I am the chairman of the Amadou Diallo Foundation.