John Hickenlooper
Any businessman will tell you that transportation is fundamental to success.Collection: Success
I would argue that's because we had a bunch of smart people running around here. They were coming in and working very hard and many of them had left jobs in which they made significantly more money.Collection: Money
We don't want the federal government coming in and telling us how to do our environmental remediation or how we're going to do our healthcare.Collection: Environmental
Even as we continue to carry the banner of civil rights and environmental justice, we've also got to focus on many, many people - for them, life starts with a good job.Collection: Environmental
I assume we will have figured out a way to efficiently utilize solar energy and tied that to an efficient way to use nuclear energy in such a way that it doesn't pose a serious environmental issue.Collection: Environmental
Advances in automation, artificial intelligence and robotics, while increasing productivity, will also cause major upheavals to the workforce.Collection: Intelligence
The Affordable Care Act was passed in large part because of recognition that our nation's health care system is not working. The act is not perfect, but it is a starting point, and we have been using it to improve the health of Coloradans.Collection: Health
When you grow up a fatherless son, in many ways you have to raise yourself. No one tells you what looks good on you, how to carry yourself, or provides the approval. Without a father, you grow up never knowing what you didn't have. There is no intimate model of who you want to become, so it's as if you're always guessing.
Let's face it: the War on Drugs was a disaster. It may be well intentioned... but it sent millions of kids to prison, gave them felonies oftentimes when they had no violent crimes.
If we want to close the achievement gap, build a well-educated workforce and responsible citizenry, we must start with our youngest children.
The old system, the War on Drugs, was a train wreck.
From my subjective position, there was no honeymoon.
Secure the border; have an ID system that works. Have a guest worker system. And then, finally, hold businesses accountable. Once you do that, most of the chambers of commerce and those who are clamoring around immigration will take a deep breath and relax.
In Colorado, we passed universal background checks and magazine limits. We need to do that nationally, and we need to raise the purchase age, extend waiting periods for gun purchases, fund gun violence research, pass red flag laws, and more - no matter how hard the gun lobby tries to block it.
If you don't trust the media, they are not going to trust you, and if they don't trust you, it's hard for the public to trust you.
Tough times call for tough choices and pinching every penny.
Colorado does not shut down. Colorado does not quit. Colorado does not break.
Especially during the first nine months, there was so much going on with trying to hire 55 people to run the city, it was hard to imagine any honeymoon.
Some day, someone will do something wrong and there will be a scandal to report in the paper. When that happens, we will address it honestly and openly and try to deal with it as quickly and as fairly as we can, and keep moving the city forward.
A mayor is a symbol and a public face of what a city bureaucracy provides its citizens.
The most important thing a mayor does is hire talented people to run the city.
Of everyone else who was running, and there were some very talented people, none of them had anywhere near the experience I had in hiring people, holding them accountable, creating systems for accountability.
Last, in restaurants you spend a lot of time dealing with people who are very unhappy. Soup has been spilled on their laps, they've waited 10 minutes to get their check so they can leave, and you learn how to listen, I think, in a much more proactive way than government does.
In the restaurant business, you never want to have enemies, whereas it seems that many politicians judge their success by how high their enemies are and whether they can show that they can hold their ground and give a punch for every punch they take.
I would argue that one of the issues which the public should be much more emphatic about with all politicians... is patronage, appointing people to high positions because they supported your campaign or helped you raise money.
The world has become rapidly more competitive.
You looked at Stanford or Harvard, or the University of Colorado, these were powerful engines just turning out people ready to create and grow businesses.
For me, the risks in terms of opening that brewpub were fairly high. I put my house up as collateral, I invested the liquid money I had and two years of my time to get it over, but that's really not much of a risk for what the potential reward was if it worked.
If it was really successful, it was a life calling, a career I was excited about doing, so I didn't think the overall risk was anywhere near as high as what the reward was.
And if I lost I would have gone back to 12 weeks of vacation, because I was successful enough that I was spending much more time on non-profit boards and traveling a lot.
Oftentimes, when constituencies or sectors of opinion are distinct, when they are confronted with a situation where they're going to have to make a serious compromise, they react very negatively publicly, but they also recognize when they step back that this is right.
Today we're dealing with metropolitan Shanghai, metropolitan New Delhi or Paris. If we're competing at that level, our diversity, that richness of people coming from so many different backgrounds, is one of our greatest advantages.
America is always attracting people, from all over the earth.
We are, by many measures, one of the more diverse cities in the country, growing more diverse all the time, and one of the more harmonious in terms of how we live together.
I think we're in good shape, but the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina is in some small way mitigated by the fact that we now have more people talking about it, thinking about it and working on it, so that we will be more vigilant and ready.
Is there some risk every day we walk out our front door? Every time we get in our car? Yeah. Are we materially less safe now than we were 10 years ago? Whatever delta there is, it's very small.
There could have been more planning in New Orleans, but you look at all the devastation that happened there - have we gotten to 3,000 deaths yet? For that magnitude of a disaster, that's not all that bad.
Denver is a city that will be far more defined by its future than its past.
Given that, and assuming that we begin to adjust to issues like climate change and the greenhouse effect, Denver's location in the center of the country becomes a tremendous advantage.
We will see the increasingly rapid rate of growth we've already been seeing in Colorado continue.
We need to recognize that we can't allow people that are aberrations of nature to take away the joys and freedoms that we enjoy.
Bernie Sanders deserves a lot of credit because he has raised issues.
In 1999, I found myself the unlikely leader of a community-based effort to protect what was arguably Colorado's most important brand, and one once thought to be untouchable: the 'Mile High' part of Denver's Mile High Stadium.
Wellington Webb was one of the most significant mayors of the latter half of the 20th century. His natural political instincts are almost unrivaled.
In the restaurant business, you learn quickly there's no margin in having enemies.
The one thing that I don't think the Obama administration gets anywhere near enough credit for is the high level of administrators. They meet all the time so they can synergize the federal investments. That's the way any corporation would do it.
This is a generous country that realizes people want to work hard.
No matter how the Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, states are making progress in developing strategies to provide more access to quality health care coverage.
What I want most is for my son to be proud of me.
I was an entrepreneur myself and often say that I'm on loan to public service.