Richard Lamm Quotations

Roads are necessary, but the fact that we don't fully recognize that when you build a road you're doing more than building a road - you're building the future development of your city. And, that's what's never dawned on people. It still doesn't, in a way.

We must recognize that all the civil rights laws in the world are not going to solve the problem of minority underachievement. Ultimately, blacks and Hispanics are going to have to see that their solution is largely in their own hands.

America does not need another political campaign based on denial and avoidance of some of our real problems. It needs a crusade to reform and renew our country, its institutions and political system.

Many seniors understand that Social Security is social insurance as opposed to a program where we put money aside for our own retirement. But most elderly individuals think they're getting their money back. So it isn't selfishness as much as a misunderstanding.

Why give chemotherapy or even antibiotics to people with end-stage Alzheimer's disease? Keep them pain free and clean, love them but don't automatically try to get the last technology-produced breath from them. Start a preschool program instead or do something about the atrocious state of obesity in our children.

Our globe is under new dramatic environmental pressure: our globe is warming, our ice caps melting, our glaciers receding, our coral is dying, our soils are eroding, our water tables falling, our fisheries are being depleted, our remaining rainforests shrinking. Something is very, very wrong with our eco-system.

Amnesty is a big billboard, a flashing billboard, to the rest of the world that we don't really mean our immigration law.

It is clear that agriculture as we know it has experienced major changes within the life expectancy of most of us, and these changes have caused a major further deterioration of worldwide levels of nutrition.

History shows, in my opinion, that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual.

The New Deal, in my mind, has become a raw deal for my children.

Christmas is the time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell government what they want and their kids pay for it.

Modern medicine has presented us with a Faustian bargain: Our aging bodies can bankrupt our children and grandchildren. We have run into the 'law of diminishing returns' in health care, where we are often doing more and more, with higher and higher technology, at more and more cost, for less and less benefit.

Politics is a love-hate relationship. I sure know that.

It was almost a desecration to put a building on the Boulder Turnpike, which is now U.S.-36 and is almost backyards and even junkyards all the way up. We didn't have to put development just cheek to jowl all the way up to Boulder. There's enough room in Colorado! But we did.

'Diversity' is a wonderfully seductive word. It stresses differences rather than commonalities. Diverse people worldwide are mostly engaged in hating each other - that is, when they are not killing each other. A 'diverse,' peaceful or stable society is against most historical precedent.

The bottom line is, until we're helping people to stop smoking, screening for breast cancer, giving Pap smears, giving prenatal care to pregnant women, we should not go into publicly paying for the artificial heart, which will benefit at great cost only a few people.

I think that retiring the baby boomers is going to be one of the great challenges in America, that you cannot make fiscal sense out of the future of our children without taking on entitlements.

We need to start training more primary health providers and fewer specialists. We will never be able to control health care costs unless we challenge the over-emphasis on medical research, specialists and technology and put more emphasis on delivering good, everyday basic medicine to those who now have none.

I think modern societies have to ask a very basic question: What strategies buy the most health for people? Doctors can do so many marvelous things now. They can keep a corpse alive, almost.

Universal coverage, not medical technology, is the foundation of any caring health care system.

I suggest that those groups whose culture and values stress delayed gratification - education, hard work, success, and ambition - are those groups that succeed in America, regardless of discrimination.

It is my passionate belief that we can all have better health care through rationing.

I believe a nation does not maximize its health care until it starts to ask the hard question: How can we prioritize our expenditures to buy the most health care for the most people? We should not apologize for rationing; we should promote it and advance it.

I believe for some high-technology medicine, like transplants and kidney dialysis, age should be a consideration in the delivery of that technology. In a world of limited resources, we have a larger duty to a 10-year-old than to a 90-year-old.

Everything we do in public policy prevents us from doing something else. To govern is to choose.

America has to ask itself not what it wants, but what it can afford... The New Deal, in my mind, has become a raw deal for my children.

A Confucian or Jewish love of learning would gain minorities far more than any affirmative action laws we might pass.

Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want - and their kids pay for it.

We can make the United States a 'Hispanic Quebec' without much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity.

The very controversial National Identification Act of 1991, requiring all United States citizens to carry identification, has greatly enhanced the ability of law enforcement officers to identify criminals and terrorists.

I do not believe you can have infinite population or economic growth in a finite world. We are living on the shoulders of some awesome geometric curves.

I've had some major disappointments. The quality of life in Denver is worse than when I took over, and I'm embarrassed about that. But I still put in 40 hours a week running Colorado.

Right out of the University of California I had passed the bar, but Colorado was one of those places where anybody could come and nobody would ask what your background was or how long you had been here. So I took to the place with a liking.

We spend billions on marginal and often unnecessary procedures on people who are in the final dying process, yet we leave millions of Americans out of the health insurance system, and America's kids have the worst dental health in the developed world.

Politics, like theater, is one of those things where you've got to be wise enough to know when to leave.

Aging bodies are fiscal black holes into which you can pour endless amounts of money.

Employers love cheap labor, but a country should train its own people.

God is not an American. Nature did not design Americans to be prosperous forever.

History shows that nations are more fragile than their citizens think. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time.

The environment issue is hydra-headed and complicated, but it is of immense importance that we understand how fast the world is changing.

Medical need is an infinitely expandable concept. There is always one more marginal procedure that can be done. There is no end to the medical and surgical treatments that a technologically sophisticated and advanced society can give to aging bodies.

Sprawl is the American ideal way to develop. I believe that what we're developing in Denver is in no appreciable way different than what we're doing in Los Angeles - did in Los Angeles and are still doing. But I think we have developed the Los Angeles model of city-building, and I think it is unfortunate.

I feel very strongly that the Democratic Party has, in the past, been the party of the future. I think when you look at Social Security and Medicare, when you look at the civil rights movement, the women's movement, I think the Democratic Party has always been in the forefront of change.

I think we're rapidly approaching the day where medical science can keep people alive in hospitals, hooked up to tubes and things, far beyond when any kind of quality of life is left at all.

The approaching exhaustion of domestic reserves of petroleum and the rapid depletion of world reserves will have a profound effect on Americans in the cities and on the farms.

A nation can't get strong on political pablum.

I had a group of Hispanic Americans come into my office in 1976 who worked in a Denver packing plant. They had just been fired by their employer who turned around and hired illegal aliens for a lot less money. That had a big impact on me.

A nation has its first obligation to its own workers and its own poor.

America has to ask itself not what it wants, but what it can afford.

American public policy is run on a myth.

He didn't work for money. He worked because he loved kids and education.

I believe we all must face the fact of death. It is both gift and curse.

If I wanted to be president of the United States, I'd run for the Senate in 1986. And I'm just not going to do it.

Sprawl is the American ideal way to develop.

The Democratic Party is not the party of reform.

To me, the failure of liberalism - the tradition I come from - was not recognizing there has to be justice across the generations.

We have been maintaining a standard of living by putting things on the debt of the next generation.

A truly moral health care system should start out by covering all of its citizens with basic health care. It would not be seduced by its technology and fancy buildings.

We've got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts and everything else like that and let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.

With the mayor, people recognize that illegal immigrants are so ubiquitous in our society that it could happen to anybody. You hire a lawn crew, someone to come in and redo your basement, who knows what you'll get.

I am convinced that the McCain-Kennedy bill is an amnesty.

He was the embodiment of a master educator who loved kids and had a passion for teaching.

He devoted his whole life to education. He kept on giving, even after he retired.

You know, 600,000 millionaires get a Social Security check every month. I think there's enough waste and inefficiency.

The U.S. needs to do more than change presidents. It needs to change its political culture.

I don't think growth pays its own way.

I have no permanent enemies - only people I have yet to persuade.

All we know about the new economic world is that nations which train engineers will prevail over those which train lawyers. No nation has ever sued its way to greatness.

Let me offer you, metaphorically, two magic wands that have sweeping powers to change society. With one wand you could wipe out all racism and discrimination from the hearts and minds of white America. The other wand you could wave across the ghettos and barrios of America and infuse the inhabitants with Japanese or Jewish values, respect for learning and ambition. ... I suggest that the best wand for society and for those who live in the ghettos and barrios would be the second wand.

America with 4% of the world's population has 50% of the worlds lawyers .... tort lawyers love to point out that 1% of America's health care cost is used to pay malpractice insurance ... but most doctors practice defensive medicine to avoid malpractice litigation ... these costs are not included in the 1% number above.

The biggest challenge of public policy is to know when and how the world has changed. We are no longer an empty continent with endless absorptive capacity. We have a cash-wage economy that is having terrible problems finding jobs for its own people. The concern about immigration is not nativism but common sense.

The U.S. needs to do more than change presidents. It needs to change its political culture.

You know, 600,000 millionaires get a Social Security check every month. I think there's enough waste and inefficiency.

Peace is neither the absence of war nor the presence of a disarmament agreement. Peace is a change of heart.