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.
— Richard Lamm
It is my passionate belief that we can all have better health care through rationing.
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.
Universal coverage, not medical technology, is the foundation of any caring health care system.
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.
A Confucian or Jewish love of learning would gain minorities far more than any affirmative action laws we might pass.
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.
'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.
History shows that nations are more fragile than their citizens think. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Employers love cheap labor, but a country should train its own people.
The New Deal, in my mind, has become a raw deal for my children.
The U.S. needs to do more than change presidents. It needs to change its political culture.
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.
Aging bodies are fiscal black holes into which you can pour endless amounts of money.
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.
Everything we do in public policy prevents us from doing something else. To govern is to choose.
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.
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.
The environment issue is hydra-headed and complicated, but it is of immense importance that we understand how fast the world is changing.
We can make the United States a 'Hispanic Quebec' without much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity.
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.
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.
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.
Politics is a love-hate relationship. I sure know that.
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.
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.
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.
America has to ask itself not what it wants, but what it can afford.
To me, the failure of liberalism - the tradition I come from - was not recognizing there has to be justice across the generations.
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.
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.
God is not an American. Nature did not design Americans to be prosperous forever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A nation can't get strong on political pablum.
Sprawl is the American ideal way to develop.
You know, 600,000 millionaires get a Social Security check every month. I think there's enough waste and inefficiency.
A nation has its first obligation to its own workers and its own poor.
The Democratic Party is not the party of reform.
We have been maintaining a standard of living by putting things on the debt of the next generation.
