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.

The art and culture that is New York, communications, finance, all these things help make up New York. The rest of the country should be happy that we are what we are.

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.

But I make the observation that no one of us would do things exactly alike.

. . .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.

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.