Richard Lamm Quotes

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.

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.

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 ghettoes 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 ghettoes and barrios would be the second wand.

Sprawl is the American ideal way to develop.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Democratic Party is not the party of reform.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

American public policy is run on a myth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A nation can't get strong on political pablum.

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

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.

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