Ed Koch Quotes

...the mayor should not be advancing a policy that encourages [illegal] immigrants to think of New York City as their safe haven.

I know many writers who first dictate passages, then polish what they have dictated. I speak, then I polish - occasionally I do windows.

If you seek violence, we will seek to put you in jail.

The best way to lose weight is to close your mouth - something very difficult for a politician. Or watch your food - just watch it, don't eat it.

There's enormous energy required to carry grudges - enormous energy! And I'm getting too old to expend my energy that way, cause I think every person has a limited amount of energy. So I have given up all grudges.

Don't tell me this is a difficult problem. If it weren't difficult, it wouldn't be a problem.

I can explain it to you, but I can't comprehend it for you.

Like many others, I'm deeply sympathetic to the huge numbers of people looking to come here today to escape suffering and poverty in their own lands. But as a country, we cannot afford to have a total open-door policy without any restrictions on entry.

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.

Life is indeed precious, and I believe the death penalty helps affirm this fact.

If they don't want to pay for it, they can stop drinking it.

If I traveled to the end of the rainbow as Dame Fortune did intend, Murphy would be there to tell me the pot's at the other end.

Have you ever lived in the suburbs? It's sterile. It's nothing. It's wasting your life.

When I came in, the city was on the edge of bankruptcy. I'm proud of what I did. I built the foundation that mayors after me built upon - particularly Bloomberg. But the foundation was essential because if it hadn't occurred, we would have been another Detroit.

I was born at the age of twelve on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot.

Maybe he just looks good compared to the bores he's running against.

I changed the city of New York. I gave people back their morale.

The very fact that I became mayor in 1977 conveys how you can't figure out what the people will do. Nobody thought I would be elected. When I entered I got four percent of the vote in the first poll, four percent.

I'm coming to the end of my life. I do reflect on what I've done for the 85 years that I have been given so far. And I'm proud of what I've done.

If I were running against Chuck Schumer. I would take every one of his Sunday press releases - and there are 52 for as many years as he's been there - and I would ask, 'How many of the things he said he was proposing became law?' I doubt many.

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

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

There was always a love-hate relationship with New York in the rest of the country, but I made them feel more love than hate.

Be different-if you don't have the facts and knowledge required, simply listen. When word gets around that you can listen when others tend to talk, you will be treated as a sage.

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.

Unless they can immediately demonstrate a credible fear of persecution, why shouldn't these people be returned at once to the country from which they embarked - whether it be their home country or a stopover point - at the expense of the airline that brought them? All appeals would then be made from the country to which they have been returned.

In action be primitive; in foresight, a strategist.

I'm confident President Obama will continue his unambiguous commitment to the Jewish state in his second term.

We should sell them to our worst enemies, the Russians and the Cubans.

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