When I was first elected I got 50% of the vote in '77 in the general election. In '81 I got 75%. In '85, I got 78%. No mayor has ever gotten that high a vote. So it was not an issue. Except for people who were very hostile to me. They thought they would injure me.

Should we be rewriting history just to make people feel good? That's not history, that's psychiatry.

Have you ever lived in the suburbs? It's sterile. It's nothing. It's wasting your life, and people do not wish to waste their lives once they've seen New York! This rural American thing - I'm telling you, it's a joke.

However, they ignore the fact that the First Amendment is intended to protect only against government sanctions for exercising free speech rights, not private actions.

There's a nastiness out there that wants to harm me with words. These are my enemies - the ideologues, the populists, the columnists who don't like the fact that I take them on toe-to-toe. What I try to do is tell the truth. It's not the coin of the realm in politics.

In a neighborhood, as in life, a clean bandage is much, much better than a raw or festering wound.

I intend to vote for President George W. Bush in the next election, because in my view, he is best able to wage the war against international terrorism.