I haven't committed a crime. What I did was fail to comply with the law.

Well, I think I am a very, very lucky person. I'm very fortunate.

Some of us claim that New York City is the capital of the country, indeed the capital of the world. Now, that may be a bit much for those who don't come from New York, but clearly we are an important city for reasons of our cultural advantages.

I'm confident that, were I mayor, I would do some things differently than he has. But I think there's a world of difference between him and his immediate predecessor.

The people really are what make New York City great.

I haven't committed a crime. What I did was fail to comply with the law.

Well, I was about six or seven, and my mother and father separated.

I finished law school in '56, but I was working two jobs.

I went to Israel when the missiles were falling there.

The art and culture that is New York, communications, finance, all these things help make up New York. The rest of the country should be happy that we are what we are.

Well, I'm not sure, but of one thing I am certain: History judges one differently than contemporary observers, and so I think that as time passes, I hope that not me personally so much, but our administration will be seen for some of the things that we accomplished.

Today, certain people file for bankruptcy, businesses and individuals, and it no longer has the stigma it once had. Now it's almost considered wise, a way to regroup and come back again.

But I make the observation that no one of us would do things exactly alike.

So it's a mistake for someone to think that they bailed New York out. They did assist us, for which we are grateful, but it's a mistake to say we bailed New York out by giving them a grant of money to help those poor people who throw it away on welfare.

This is about these particular candidates in this particular year. That's what motivates me.

We borrowed money, it helped us with bonds and what not, and the Federal Government backed it, but it was a guarantee, it was not a grant. And we not only paid it off, but we paid it off ahead of time.

As a matter of fact, even when I finished law school, I had no notion of public service then.

But the courts have dismissed the lawsuits against me and Lee Brown.

Children are amazing, and while I go to places like Princeton and Harvard and Yale, and of course I teach at Columbia, NYU, and that's nice and I love students, but the most fun of all are the real little ones, the young ones.

We have not always agreed, but I have said repeatedly and publicly many times that Al Sharpton has never counseled violence, but he gets blamed for a whole lot of that.

In 1975 I was among a group of blacks who formed the Black Americans in Support of Israel Committee.

I love children, and most of my involvement now has to do with children or youth programs.

There is no point in me worrying about what Bloomberg or Badillo will do.

And I tell people I'm in charge of children, children I haven't even met yet.

You can't twist Al Sharpton's arm.

My mother came here to New York. She and my grandmother were domestics, cooking, cleaning for other people.

I went downtown as a lawyer and then I worked in a liquor store at night, as I had done all through law school. And so when I got to the point where I could give up the night job, I joined the political club.

And, as a matter of fact, I am the chairman of the Amadou Diallo Foundation.

What becomes a crime deserving capital punishment when the tables are turned is a matter of small moment when the negro woman is the accusing party.

The seasons come up undisturbed by crime and war.

Examples one finds in the philosophical literature are somebody who's seen the trial of a child of theirs, where they're being proved guilty of some crime that would drive the parent into a depression, maybe a suicidal depression.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Dullness is the only crime for which an editor ought to be hung.

Success in crime always invites to worse deeds.

Crime, to the man of the forties, was an alien monstrous terror.

Rather let the crime of the guilty go unpunished than condemn the innocent.

I will never have a drink and get behind the wheel of a car. It's not illegal to drink and drive, but there becomes a certain point where it does become a crime.

I think there's a lot of naivete and hubris within our mix of personalities. That's probably our worst crime. I keep wondering what a "mature" record means.

The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.

A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

I didn't break into comics to write fairytales or crime comics.

Powerful states can maintain themselves only by crime, little states are virtuous only by weakness.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

We got into all the trouble you could ever imagine. We figured that if the Jones boys and all the gangsters ran Chicago, we had our own territory now. All the stores, all the crime, we were in charge of everything, my stepbrother and my brother.

Next to the love of God, the love of country is the best preventive of crime.

The fact that a player is very short of time is, to my mind, as little to be considered an excuse as, for instance, the statement of the law-breaker that he was drunk at the time he committed the crime.

We are not supposed to go out and kill all those we suspect to have committed a crime.

The worst crime is faking it.