Wayne Messam Quotes

Detroit's really important to the success of our state. You know, you can't have a successful Michigan if the biggest city isn't a success as well.

We need a system where some politicians - who quite rightly respond to the public mood - are prepared to stand up in favour of housebuilding, so I came up with a system that gives local people something they really want in return for building more homes. In our case in Hatfield, it's a new town centre.

The credit for much of this rightly belongs to the late Mayor Daley who forged a coalition of business and labor that kept Chicago always moving ahead.

You have the biggest impact on controlling, on affecting local lives as mayor. It's so much more important than being a state legislator.

Preparing our city to achieve its destiny will require strong leadership.

Mayors are leaders, doers. We get things done, and we are moving America's cities forward.

Everybody would love to be mayor of Chicago. If you look at what we have done over many, many years and where we are today and the commitment by the business community, the commitment by the not-for-profit community - all this coming together - this is a wonderful city.

I strongly believe being mayor is the public post in which you have the greatest opportunity to change peoples' lives for the better. People live in cities, not states or nations. As a mayor, you are connected directly to citizens.

Rudy Giuliani did some phenomenal things in the city if you think of the transformation of the city and the quality of life.

Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn't successful - isn't even a city, really - unless it can lay claim to being 'vibrant.'

I care about making New York better.

As mayor of San Francisco, I will provide the vision and work hard to make San Francisco a beautiful, well-planned city with excellent housing and transportation options.

Being mayor of San Francisco is dealing with pot holes and dog doo.

The government of the cities is the one conspicuous failure of the United States.

If, instead of hiring half-baked revolutionary planners to fill our college undergraduates with ingenious schemes to disperse populations, split up big cities into little ones, go underground or into distant places to escape bombs and congestion, abandon large urban areas in favor of roadside villages, we were to publish reliable, simply written, common-sense information to control the building boom, what a country this would be!

I think Bill de Blasio is doing interesting housing stuff in New York, Rahm Emanuel is doing interesting stuff with the infrastructure bank in Chicago. I want to go to America to meet with and engage with American mayors.

I want Baltimore to be the coolest city in the world.

Being mayor is about offering a vision for the city, putting the right people in the right place, and executing that vision.

Cities are central to the shaping and delivery of national policy objectives, and in return, they are the places where social, environmental, and economic policies play out in practice.

It's really time for the State of Wisconsin to form a better relationship with the greater Milwaukee area.

I think of being the mayor of a big city with so many incredible things happening - but also so many challenges and opportunities - as really being kind of the chief advocate for the people.

Portland needs a mayor who is going to take on the significant issues this city is facing.

I get up in the morning and by the time I've gone to bed there's three or four or five new crises that weren't there when I started the day. That's what being mayor of Portland is about.

I want to become Kiev's mayor because I love my city very much and want to improve life in it.

It's not, 'We have a city to bid, now let's go check in with the federal government'.