Rudy Giuliani Quotations

The worst situation with radiation escaping is if you are downwind from it. You could virtually be on one side and not affected by the radiation. If you're on the other side and you're downwind from it, you are going to be affected.

It's about time law enforcement got as organized as organized crime.

Civilization must stand up and combat the current collapse of governance, the rise of violence, and the spread of chaos and fear in many parts of the world.

There are terrible, terrible memories of September 11th, things that I saw, people that I lost, the devastation, the identification of bodies. I mean, all these memories come back to you at different times. And then the other side of it this tremendous response with the firefighters and the police officers saving people, the rescue workers.

When people endure a traumatic event, they are either defeated or made stronger. On Sept. 11, I told New Yorkers, 'I want you to emerge stronger from this.' My words were partially a hope and partially an observation that people in New York City handle big things better than little things. I could not be more proud of the way my city responded.

We need to know who's in the United States. We need to know everyone who's in the United States that comes in here from a foreign country. And we have to separate the ones who are dangerous from the ones who aren't. To accomplish that, we need a fence. We need a technological fence. We need a border patrol.

The only time the private parts of someone's life are relevant is when they're affecting public performance. And just because someone is a public person doesn't mean that any part of his or her private life is open to scrutiny. If someone is doing his or her job, you have to have enough empathy to understand that we all have personal problems.

When I was mayor of New York, my views changed. I began as mayor of New York City thinking that I could reform the New York City school system. After two or three years, four years, I became an advocate of choice, of scholarships, and vouchers, and parental choice, because I thought that was the only way to really change the school system.

On September 11, 2001, we thought we were going to be attacked many, many times between then and now. We haven't been. I believe we had a president who made the right decision at the right time... to put us on offense against terrorists.

In choosing a president, we really don't choose a Republican or Democrat, a conservative or liberal. We choose a leader.

The use of military force against Iran would be very dangerous. It would be very provocative. The only thing worse would be Iran being a nuclear power.

When we faced a possibility here in New York of chemical and biological attack, three days after September 11, I called in all of the experts, academic experts, Nobel Prize laureates, and doctors who had dealt with anthrax, doctors who had dealt with various forms of chemical and biological attack.

There are many qualities that make a great leader. But having strong beliefs, being able to stick with them through popular and unpopular times, is the most important characteristic of a great leader.

The United States is paradise compared to China, Russia, Ecuador and Cuba, with regard to the press. And with regard to secrecy and transparency.

Blacks commit murder eight times more per capita than any other group in our society. If I had put all of my police officers on Park Avenue and none in Harlem, thousands and thousands more blacks would've been killed during the eight years that I was mayor.

I was the person, I think, who first said the evening of September 11 that we shouldn't hold this against the Arab community, the Muslim community. We should focus on the individuals and that groups that were involved and not participate in group blame.

As Americans, we're not sure we share values. We're sometimes even afraid to use the word 'values.' We talk about teaching ethics in schools - people say, 'What ethics? Whose ethics? Maybe we can't.' And they confuse that with teaching of religion.

Courage is managing fear to accomplish what you want to accomplish. And it's a great demonstration of love. It's really what love is. It's finding areas in which other people are more important than you.

Our safety requires a long-term military presence in the Middle East because that's where the plans to attack us are emanating.

The danger to a black child in America is not a white police officer. The danger is another black.

Revenge is not a noble sentiment, but it is a human one.

Now we understand much more clearly. why people from all over the world want to come to New York and to America. It's called freedom.

Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn't know that the Soviets were moving 400,000 or 500,000 troops. We missed it.

Change is not a destination, just as hope is not a strategy.

When you're in a crisis of, you know, tremendous proportions, it's beyond any human capability to control, you just make the best decisions you can, and you just hope that your intuition is correct.

Liberty is ceding a certain amount of your ability to do what you want so that everybody else can live in peace and freedom and respecting the rights of other people.

There is no city in America that has reduced crime as much as we have in the last three years. This is not the product of accident. This is the product of design.

I'll tell you what makes me feel worthwhile: organizing and solving other people's problems. It makes me feel good to go to Mexico City and figure out theories on how you can reorganize and reduce crime. To me, it's one of the more fulfilling ways to spend a day.

The most important lesson my dad taught me was how to manage fear. Early on, he taught me that in a time of emergency, you've got to become deliberately calm.

Leaders need to be optimists. Their vision is beyond the present.

I've probably saved more black lives as mayor of New York City than any mayor in New York City with the possible exception of Mike Bloomberg, who was there for 12 years.

You never begin a new life. It's a mistake to think that you end one part of your life and start another as if there's no continuity.

My father taught me, in boxing, that when you - particularly when you get hit in the face for the first time - you're going to panic. That instead of panicking, just accept it. Stay calm. And any time anybody hits you, they always leave themselves open to be hit.

What we can borrow from Ronald Reagan... is that great sense of optimism. He led by building on the strengths of America, not running America down.

When you confront a problem you begin to solve it.

I was a Yankee fan in Brooklyn because my father was a Yankee fan. And my father was required to live in Brooklyn with my mothers family, who were all Dodger fans. So he was surrounded by Dodger fans. He was a Yankee fan. So his revenge was to make me a Yankee fan.

I think one of the biggest mistakes that America has made - and maybe the world because this is, sort of, the core of communism and socialism - is that you can have perfect solutions to social problems like poverty, like crime. You're not going to eliminate all crime. Maybe you'll never eliminate all poverty.

We have too many politicians who are poll-driven to excess. Polls are important. You've got to know what the public is thinking, but you can't let them drive you completely.

My view of Sarah Palin is she is the most dynamic figure maybe in politics, even more in some ways than President Obama, who is a little more scripted than she is. He is great with the teleprompter.

I don't invest in the stock market. I did it a long, long time ago when I was really young, and I got involved in all the investigations and all the prosecutions, and I felt it was better if I didn't make individual investments. So I'm invested in funds, but not in individual - not in individual stocks.

Republicans spend too much time on defense. We have to be on offense. We have to point out the truth. President Obama stole seven hundred million dollars from Medicare. Republicans want to preserve Medicare. Obamacare robs from Medicare.

The rule is, you can protest all you want. Make all the noise you want. Carry all the signs you want. The minute you throw a rock, you get arrested. The minute you break a window, you get arrested. The minute you break into a store, you get arrested.

We don't have real control over death. You could die of a heart attack, a building could fall on you, you could be in an accident, you could have a fatal disease. So, how should you conduct your life? You just go ahead and live, taking reasonable precautions - like handling the mail more carefully.

I think to adequately manage a crisis, you have to see it. Because there's only so much somebody else can tell you about it, and they impose their own distortions on the description. You need to see it yourself.

In an emergency, you rarely get one consistent piece of advice. You usually have two or three people with two or three different ideas. So you want to have your own set of thoughts.

The Republican Party is a much bigger tent than people give it credit for. We have a lot of what I guess you all call moderate Republicans.

When I said the city would be stronger, I didn't know that. I just hoped it. There are parts of you that say, 'Maybe we're not going to get through this.' You don't listen to them.

I am open and will continue to be open to ways to limit abortion. What I am not open to is to removing the right.

America needs to be defended. We need missile defense to better police the skies over the United States.

You never agree with any one candidate 100 percent. I don't agree with myself 100 percent. You don't even agree with me 100 percent.

I was Mayor of New York during a great Yankees dynasty. I got to preside over the city during four Yankees championships.

I was pretty successful before Sept. 11 and fully expected that when I left being mayor I would be very successful.

So I think we're, we're, we're as broad a political party, if not broader than the Democratic Party, just in a different political spectrum.

With the spirit of my administration, New York City is poised for dramatic change. The era of fear has had a long enough reign.

You've got to be who you are. You've got to be honest with people. If your views change on something, you've got to be willing to express it.

I get through difficult situations by looking at how other people have gone through them. I say to myself, 'If they can go through it, then I can.' Or, If they can go through worse, I can go through whatever I'm going through.

I am a free market Republican. I am against subsidies, in most cases.

I'm not sure if President Obama is an ideologue or a pragmatist. I am hoping and praying he's a pragmatist.

One of the lessons from Sept. 11 is that America requires a long-term presence in those parts of the world that endanger us. This notion has become controversial, but frankly, the need could not be clearer.

My attempt is to try to broaden the base of the Republican Party, to try to bring in people that can agree and that can disagree on that, because I think the issues that we face about terrorism, about our economy, about the growth of our economy are so important that we have to have the biggest outreach possible.

There is a reality to the primary process, and you don't win primaries by being ahead in national polls. You win them by winning Iowa, by winning New Hampshire, by winning South Carolina, winning Florida.

As mayor, I used to always feel the important thing is that people respect me, not love me - but it is really much nicer when they love you, too. I'm going to try to keep it that way.

I probably saved more black lives as mayor of New York City than any mayor in the history of this city. And I did it by having to use police officers in black areas where there was an astounding amount of crime. If that crime was in white areas, police officers would be in white areas.

The reality is even if you are a hands-on Mayor or Governor or chief executive, at best, you must know about 10 or 20% of what's going on. Otherwise, you never get through the day... I was very hands on, and there's lots of stuff I didn't know, and lots of things that either went wrong or right that I would find out about afterwards.

Schools exist in America and have always existed to train responsible citizens of the United States of America. If they don't do that, it's very hard to hold us together as a country, because it's shared values that hold us together.

You have to keep a strong sense of who you really are - and I have a pretty strong sense of myself. It gets me in trouble when I say this, but I don't think of myself as a politician. I've always tried to be honest when communicating with people.

What did Sept. 11 do? It took me from 60-70 percent name recognition as mayor of New York to about 90 percent. Of course it had an impact. But it's not the only reason I was successful.

In choosing Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain has chosen for the future.

We should be tolerant, fair, open, and we should understand the rights that all people have in our society

I think the world is much better off without Saddam Hussein than with him.

St. Paul's Chapel stands - without so much as a broken window. Little miracle.

I think that taxes have to exist. They should exist at the lowest possible level, and to the extent that we can, we shouldn't invent more. Maybe that's my experience being mayor of New York City, where we had so many taxes.

Bonuses balance my budget in New York City. The bigger the bonuses on Wall Street, the more money I had to spend on poor people. The New York City budget is determined greatly by the bonuses given on Wall Street.

I was very serious about being a priest, twice in my life. Almost joined the Montfort Seminary after I graduated from high school. Almost went back in the seminary during college.

Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

Putting pressure on grand juries to indict in my view is un-American. A grand jury should be allowed to be fair and impartial. They shouldn't have people yelling and screaming.

When I became mayor of New York City, I had a $2.4 billion deficit. And everybody wanted me to raise taxes. I said, 'If I raise taxes, I'll drive people out of New York City, and then I'll be raising taxes again.' So what I did was I cut expenses by 15 percent.

One major thing stopping people from coming to the city was exorbitant crime and that, for the large part, has changed,

I don't know what I'm going to be doing in 2008, ... I wasn't planning when I was associate attorney general or U.S. attorney (in the 1980s) to run for mayor. It all came gradually much closer to the time that I did it.

should have been held on high bail whether he was or he wasn't a police officer. Everybody should be held to an extremely high standard when it comes to drunk driving.

B-train service will be out four or five hours,

He wanted to beat Hillary Clinton in an election. But he clearly didn't want to be a U.S. senator,

Just so we're absolutely clear about it, ... I'm here for one purpose and one purpose alone: to endorse Doug Forrester for governor, to urge the people of New Jersey to vote, to give themselves the chance for reform, for change. And Doug Forrester can accomplish that.

John was a very good friend ... a great guy, a patriotic American, ... Our hearts and sympathy and condolences go out to his family.

It is going to be a great celebration. Everybody, obviously, is going to enjoy it,

The prayers are for the people missing, the people who have died, and for America and for everyone that survived,

understanding the difficulties and split-second decisions that police officers have to make during the performance of their duties.

The reality is that we don't expect that we're going to be able to find anyone alive,

We used to be the crime capital and now we're the safest large city in America. We used to be the welfare capital of America and now we're seen as the city that has moved more people off welfare, has moved more people to work from welfare, of any city in America,

At this point there are several competing hypotheses for his illness, ... In other words, West Nile is not the only possibility.

The whole notion that police officers won't cooperate, this blue wall of silence thing -- the police commissioner and I challenged the police officers to break that silence, ... And one police officer -- a police officer, not a civilian -- came forward and courageously gave the district attorney the information that really has helped to pull this case together.

The thing to worry about the most -- it would be the rush hour,

America, ... needs to be defended. We need missile defense to better police the skies over the United States.

Emergencies, by their very nature, are impossible situations to handle,

try to help them, put them in facilities where they can get help.

This is one of the most tragic days that I can remember in the city,

This is a state that deserves the kind of honest, accountable leadership that Doug Forrester can bring.

This is not a clash of civilizations, ... It's a clash between murderers and humanity. It's a matter of justice leading to peace.

It turned out to be a difficult day, but the city got through it with flying colors,

All of us will miss him at Yankee Stadium, ... We were all uplifted for having known him.