Richard Lamm

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.

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 can't get strong on political pablum.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

History shows that nations are more fragile than their citizens think. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time.

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.

We can make the United States a 'Hispanic Quebec' without much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity.

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.

The environment issue is hydra-headed and complicated, but it is of immense importance that we understand how fast the world is changing.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Everything we do in public policy prevents us from doing something else. To govern is to choose.

God is not an American. Nature did not design Americans to be prosperous forever.

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.

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.

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.

Aging bodies are fiscal black holes into which you can pour endless amounts of money.

It is my passionate belief that we can all have better health care through rationing.

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.

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.

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.

Sprawl is the American ideal way to develop.

'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.

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

Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want - and their kids pay for it.

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

He didn't work for money. He worked because he loved kids and education.

We've got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts and everything else like that and let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.

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

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.

American public policy is run on a myth.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.