I would argue that one of the issues which the public should be much more emphatic about with all politicians… is patronage, appointing people to high positions because they supported your campaign or helped you...

The most important thing a mayor does is hire talented people to run the city.

And if I lost I would have gone back to 12 weeks of vacation, because I was successful enough that I was spending much more time on non-profit boards and traveling a lot.

I would argue that’s because we had a bunch of smart people running around here. They were coming in and working very hard and many of them had left jobs in which they made significantly...

The same with running for mayor. If I lost the election, I had invested about six months of my time and about $100,000 of my own money.

Denver is a city that will be far more defined by its future than its past.

If it was really successful, it was a life calling, a career I was excited about doing, so I didn’t think the overall risk was anywhere near as high as what the reward was.

The world has become rapidly more competitive.

Especially during the first nine months, there was so much going on with trying to hire 55 people to run the city, it was hard to imagine any honeymoon.

If you look at the number of people who died from terrorism, compared to the number of highway deaths or deaths from smoking, what is safe?

There could have been more planning in New Orleans, but you look at all the devastation that happened there – have we gotten to 3,000 deaths yet? For that magnitude of a disaster, that’s not...

Even 12 years ago, the university system in the United States was far and away above anything you could find in most parts of the world.

In restaurants, you never have enough money, you’re taking a very diverse group of people and building them into a team with a common purpose.

Today we’re dealing with metropolitan Shanghai, metropolitan New Delhi or Paris. If we’re competing at that level, our diversity, that richness of people coming from so many different backgrounds, is one of our greatest advantages.

From my subjective position, there was no honeymoon.

In the restaurant business, you never want to have enemies, whereas it seems that many politicians judge their success by how high their enemies are and whether they can show that they can hold their...

We are, by many measures, one of the more diverse cities in the country, growing more diverse all the time, and one of the more harmonious in terms of how we live together.

Every single person I talked to thought it was outrageous they would sell the name. We had a poll done in the six-county area paying the tax for the new stadium, and 69 percent of...

Given that, and assuming that we begin to adjust to issues like climate change and the greenhouse effect, Denver’s location in the center of the country becomes a tremendous advantage.

Is there some risk every day we walk out our front door? Every time we get in our car? Yeah. Are we materially less safe now than we were 10 years ago? Whatever delta there...

We will see the increasingly rapid rate of growth we’ve already been seeing in Colorado continue.

For me, the risks in terms of opening that brewpub were fairly high. I put my house up as collateral, I invested the liquid money I had and two years of my time to get...

I assume we will have figured out a way to efficiently utilize solar energy and tied that to an efficient way to use nuclear energy in such a way that it doesn’t pose a serious...

Last, in restaurants you spend a lot of time dealing with people who are very unhappy. Soup has been spilled on their laps, they’ve waited 10 minutes to get their check so they can leave,...

You looked at Stanford or Harvard, or the University of Colorado, these were powerful engines just turning out people ready to create and grow businesses.

You have to recognize that this is the result of the sacrifice and hard work of the employees. In the end, it is the rank and file who find ways to accomplish their tasks with...

I hope there’s some cowtown left, because as much as we are going to be defined by the future, the past is also part of who we are.

Of everyone else who was running, and there were some very talented people, none of them had anywhere near the experience I had in hiring people, holding them accountable, creating systems for accountability.

You take all that heritage away from Denver, how different are we from Indianapolis or Cleveland? It’s a crucial part of our identity.

It’s one of the most unusual things I’ve heard of in years.

I talk all the time about the importance to the metro area of the Rocky Mountains and the Western heritage of cowboys and ranching.

Oftentimes, when constituencies or sectors of opinion are distinct, when they are confronted with a situation where they’re going to have to make a serious compromise, they react very negatively publicly, but they also recognize...

A mayor is a symbol and a public face of what a city bureaucracy provides its citizens.

I think we’re in good shape, but the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina is in some small way mitigated by the fact that we now have more people talking about it, thinking about it and working...

Some day, someone will do something wrong and there will be a scandal to report in the paper. When that happens, we will address it honestly and openly and try to deal with it as...

America is always attracting people, from all over the earth.