Words matter. These are the best Richard Lamm Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Amnesty is a big billboard, a flashing billboard, to the rest of the world that we don’t really mean our immigration law.
Aging bodies are fiscal black holes into which you can pour endless amounts of money.
We can make the United States a ‘Hispanic Quebec’ without much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity.
Sprawl is the American ideal way to develop.
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.
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.
To me, the failure of liberalism – the tradition I come from – was not recognizing there has to be justice across the generations.
Politics, like theater, is one of those things where you’ve got to be wise enough to know when to leave.
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.
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.
A nation can’t get strong on political pablum.
Politics is a love-hate relationship. I sure know that.
It is my passionate belief that we can all have better health care through rationing.
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.
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.
We need to start training more primary health providers and fewer specialists. We will never be able to control health care costs unless we challenge the over-emphasis on medical research, specialists and technology and put more emphasis on delivering good, everyday basic medicine to those who now have none.
Everything we do in public policy prevents us from doing something else. To govern is to choose.
History shows that nations are more fragile than their citizens think. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time.
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.
The U.S. needs to do more than change presidents. It needs to change its political culture.
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.
The New Deal, in my mind, has become a raw deal for my children.
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.
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.
Medical need is an infinitely expandable concept. There is always one more marginal procedure that can be done. There is no end to the medical and surgical treatments that a technologically sophisticated and advanced society can give to aging bodies.
A nation has its first obligation to its own workers and its own poor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
America has to ask itself not what it wants, but what it can afford.
I believe we all must face the fact of death. It is both gift and curse.
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.
You know, 600,000 millionaires get a Social Security check every month. I think there’s enough waste and inefficiency.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He didn’t work for money. He worked because he loved kids and education.
A Confucian or Jewish love of learning would gain minorities far more than any affirmative action laws we might pass.
