Risa Lavizzo-Mourey Quotes

In New York, especially, so much of your life is spent on the streets. You don't always want to be driving around in an SUV with a security guard. You want to be able to walk to a restaurant; you want to go and do things.

There's so much importance in honoring your everyday hero. It doesn't take money. It doesn't take connections. What matters is that people get involved. Whether your passion is gun control or food or whatever it may be, everybody needs to stop being so self-absorbed.

I don't want young people to think they can't make a difference because they don't have money.

I've very proud to be mayor of our great city. It's a city with a heart and a soul. Chicago has a unique spirit. Our business community wants to give back.

I think people instinctively know that their job is to give service and that they are part of a community. It had a great impact on me when my father walked the picket lines and I walked with him during the civil rights movement.

But when others suggested that the poor should not simply be the objects of these programs but also the subjects - that they should be actively involved in shaping the programs, making decisions about how to spend the money etc. - some of the previous supporters reconsidered.

Read the editorial page of your local paper. It introduces you to opinion and can be terrifically provocative and perhaps a great motivating force for you to get involved in your community, regardless of your political ideology.

Bike lanes - I put that now in the category of things you shouldn't discuss at dinner parties, right? It used to be money and politics and religion. Now, in New York, you should add bike lanes.

I've biked my whole life. We didn't have bus service when I was going to school in Holland, so I biked around 25 kilometers to school every day.

Engaging with your school as a unit of community is pretty powerful.

Pedestrians and cyclists are squeezed by planners into narrow and often dangerous spaces - the afterthoughts of urban design.

Urban mobility is a massive global challenge. The world needs people to use multiple forms of transport - a mix of biking, walking, and other low-energy forms of transportation.

Everyone is busy, but I believe it depends on what you prioritize. My husband and I teach Sunday School together at our church and are very involved.

The school must be "a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons".

I will go and speak at rotary clubs. I will go and speak at schools. I'm so much in the community, but in a way that I love. It's been such a positive thing.

I grew up in the '50s and '60s when Jack Kennedy was president. We would watch him on television. And our teachers always talked about the good things public servants could do. I thought maybe that's something I should do. So when I got out of law school, my wife, Jane, and I became precinct captains.

Community. A friend started a real estate brokerage a few years ago. By the time she'd added her second employee, she was a pillar of her 35,000-person community. No rule says that only the local banker or car dealer can organize the program to raise supplemental funds for the public library or send the high school band on a well-earned special trip. Participating in community affairs, with time more than dollars, is good business from day one. It gets your name around, adds to your distinctiveness, and, best of all, makes you an attractive employer (which is the key to sustained success).

Start locally and build. Start small and grow. Start in your house, then move to your school, your book club, your gym, your church, your temple, your city.

It's the connection between schools and communities that creates greatness in schools.

The mobile phone is very dangerous. If you're walking and looking at your phone, you're not walking - you're surfing the internet.

By its very definition, civic responsibility means taking a healthy role in the life of one's community. That means that classroom lessons should be complemented by work outside the classroom. Service-learning does just that, tying community service to academic learning.

Either we stay at home and become pillars of the community or we go out and tour. We couldn't really find any communities that still needed pillars.

People have got to show up, showing up at meetings, rallies, marches, City Council, courtrooms. You've got to show up.

With its array of gadgets and machines, all powered by energies that are destructive of land or air or water, and connected to work, market, school, recreation, etc., by gasoline engines, the modern home is a veritable factory of waste and destruction. It is the mainstay of the economy of money. But within the economies of energy and nature, it is a catastrophe. It takes in the world's goods and converts them into garbage, sewage, and noxious fumes-for none of which have we found a use.

I would say to a young person: continue to study. Study what is taking place in your community, in your neighborhood, maybe at your school.