Top 60 Lori Lightfoot Quotes

To make blatant racial appeals or just blatant appeals only targeted to the LGBTQ+ community, I didn’t think that that was a winning formula, and it’s also inconsistent with who I am.

I am a lesbian. I am married to a woman. We have a child. We have a family.

I do not support the city’s red light camera system. This system was sold to Chicagoans as a public safety solution, but it’s always really been about revenue, and we’ve seen that fines fall disproportionately on people of color.

Our kids’ lives depend upon keeping them safe. That has to be a fundamental duty and responsibility for me as mayor. That means we have to continue hard but necessary work of bridging the divide between police and communities they serve.

If you look at the number of aldermen who have been prosecuted and found liable of federal crimes over the years… the common thread among all of them is doing something in the exercise of aldermanic prerogative or privilege.

You’re never going to catch me agreeing with anything that Bruce Rauner says, given the things he’s done in this state, trying to pit the city of Chicago against the rest of Illinois – I’ll never agree with anything Bruce Rauner says.

I’m pretty funny on my own.

I’ve been lucky and I recognize that, but I haven’t lost sight of that girl I was.

I support a progressive state income tax.

When I was in my 20s and kind of going through my own coming out process, I feared that I would lose my family. I feared that I would grow old alone. And that was a real part of my struggle.

When I hear stories about the number of kids that have been lost to violence, where families grow up teaching kids ‘duck and cover’ long before they learn their ABC’s or their colors, I know there is something profoundly wrong in our city.

I think that the people who come from communities like me as an African-American woman, as a member of the LGBT community, we haven’t sat in the corners of power.

I believe that everybody is entitled to a presumption of innocence.

We need to educate our young people about the dangers of gun violence and that there are real consequences for solving disputes with guns.

There’s significant movement as far to the left in our party as far as you can go, where people are trying to out-Bernie Bernie.

When young people grow up with fear as the norm, they don’t have the luxury to dream.

It’s going very different for citizens of Chicago to know that they have an advocate in the mayor’s office – getting rid of the ‘us versus them,’ the lack of investment in our neighborhoods, the feeling that the only thing that matters is if you’re a campaign donor.

I am an independent reform candidate. I do not represent the past.

I have to explain to my daughter what it means when adults lie. I have to explain to my daughter what it means when adults are bullies. I have to explain to my daughter what it means when an adult says something that’s not true just to try to score political points.

Both my brothers played football. My mother had season tickets as a school board member. I was in the band, my sister was in the band. The thing was, the unifying civic activity was obsession over high school football.

People feel like city government is corrupt. They feel like it doesn’t work unless you have clout.

Make no mistake about it: Change is hard, but change is necessary.

Taxes and fees in Chicago and Cook County are forcing low-income families like the one I grew up in out of this city. It’s clear we can’t keep treating low-income and middle-class families like an ATM machine with no limit.

I’m not affiliated with Ed Burke, Joe Berrios or anyone else who represents the old, corrupt Chicago way. I am offering voters a complete break from that past and pushing us forward in a way that brings people together and makes government more inclusive.

Breaking the back of the Chicago machine, it’s quite monumental.

If aldermen are doing their job right, they should be the ones who are closest to the vibe and the beat in their neighborhood and have a very important role to play on a number of different issues, but not a unilateral, unchecked right. That’s gone as soon as I take office.

I think he’s a great talent, Stephen Colbert.

We have a lot of taxpayers in this city who deserve to get every nickel of their tax dollars that they’re entitled to from Washington, and I intend to make that happen.

Let’s stand together, stick together, and work together for justice of every description. Racial justice. Gender justice. Immigrant justice. Economic justice. Environmental justice.

While I am opposed to elected officials running for multiple offices simultaneously, or within several months of one another, I do not support a state law making it illegal.

For more than two decades Chicagoans have routinely traveled to neighboring cities like Rosemont, Elgin, Joliet, Gary and Hammond to gamble. If people in Chicago want to gamble, then they should be able to gamble in Chicago at a city-owned, land-based casino.

Building channels for people to believe that the city sees them and hears them and is willing to invest, is going to be critically important, and we have to start that right away.

I want to make sure that I am the leader that respects the fact that kids all over the city and hopefully all over the country really understand that they can do anything that they want to do, that they set their minds to do, as long as they’ve got good, strong support from adults and love to support them.

You know, I can’t afford to take anything for granted.

What I favor is that we have health care access to people that is not income based. We have to have health care that is acceptable and it’s going to come in a number of forms.

We cannot create the perception that if you’re rich or famous or both that you got one set of justice – and for everybody else it’s something much harsher. That won’t do and we need to make sure that we have a criminal justice system that has integrity.

One of the challenges I think we have is people feel like the act of governance is a zero sum game. ‘Whatever I get, you’re not getting.’ Changing that dynamic is going to be critically important for me as a leader, so that people don’t feel they’re pitted against each other.

We have to have a school board that’s actually gonna be able to function and that has true parent representatives on it.

I gotta be me. I’m going to go to ball games, because that’s what I do. I’m going to go to live music shows, because I love live music.

When you’re walking down a street and you are a brown-skinned person or you’re a person that lives in an immigrant community, there’s no differentiating on – solely on the basis of what you look like. They don’t walk down the street saying, hi, I’m an immigrant; I’m here legally or not.

When you decide you’re going to be a public servant, you should not be able to take on interests that conflict with the city.

Police can’t be successful if they’re not viewed as legitimate by the community, and a community will not be safe if the police are not engaged in a respectful, constitutional partnership with the community.

The only thing you have in your life is your integrity.

We are a city that is a sanctuary city. We have immigrants from all over the world who call Chicago their home. They’ll continue to do that, and we’re going to continue to make sure that this is truly a welcoming community for those immigrants and we want them to come to the city of Chicago.

Retired public service workers make up the backbone of the middle class in so many of our communities.

I don’t think I’ll be a good mayor if I don’t live my authentic life, and that’s got to be involved with having fun with my spouse and my daughter.

Fundamentally, if people don’t feel like their lives are valued and they don’t value their lives, they’re not going to value their neighbors’ lives.

I grew up in a small segregated steel town 6o miles outside of Cleveland, my parents grew up in the segregated south. As a family we struggled financially, and I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s where overt racism ruled the day.

Obviously, I believe that Rahm Emanuel’s leadership has failed. Obviously, I believe we need change.

I’ve wanted to be a parent for a really long time, and I’m going to make sure I’m doing everything I can to be present in her life, to be her mother. I don’t want to be absent from her life.

Police departments, since the start of the history of this country, have been used to enforce unconstitutional laws that were designed to discriminate against communities of color and particularly African Americans.

The whole circus surrounding Ed Burke, I knew immediately from my days as a federal prosecutor, was very, very serious.

It’s not enough to be anti-Trump.

You know, I’m a former federal prosecutor. Before ICE was ICE, I did a lot of cases with Customs Enforcement.

Our children… deserve to grow up in an environment where fear is not their constant companion. And I’m determined to do everything I can to make sure every kid – in every neighborhood regardless of zip code, economic status and race or ethnicity – is able to live a life of safety.