Richard Lamm quotes

Amnesty is a big billboard, a flashing billboard, to the rest of the world that we don't really mean our immigration law. (Richard Lamm)
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. View quote
Richard Lamm
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. View quote
Richard Lamm
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. View quote
Richard Lamm
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. View quote
Richard Lamm
A Confucian or Jewish love of learning would gain minorities far more than any affirmative action laws we might pass. View quote
Richard Lamm
A nation has its first obligation to its own workers and its own poor. View quote
Richard Lamm
The Democratic Party is not the party of reform. View quote
Richard Lamm
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. View quote
Richard Lamm
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. View quote
Richard Lamm
The U.S. needs to do more than change presidents. It needs to change its political culture. (Richard Lamm)
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. View quote
Richard Lamm
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. View quote
Richard Lamm
You know, 600,000 millionaires get a Social Security check every month. I think there's enough waste and inefficiency. View quote
Richard Lamm
We have been maintaining a standard of living by putting things on the debt of the next generation. View quote
Richard Lamm
Politics is a love-hate relationship. I sure know that. View quote
Richard Lamm
American public policy is run on a myth. View quote
Richard Lamm
Employers love cheap labor, but a country should train its own people. View quote
Richard Lamm
Politics, like theater, is one of those things where you've got to be wise enough to know when to leave. View quote
Richard Lamm
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. View quote
Richard Lamm
I believe we all must face the fact of death. It is both gift and curse. (Richard Lamm)
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. View quote
Richard Lamm
To me, the failure of liberalism - the tradition I come from - was not recognizing there has to be justice across the generations. View quote
Richard Lamm
America has to ask itself not what it wants, but what it can afford. View quote
Richard Lamm
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. View quote
Richard Lamm