Ask yourself, how can I learn from the people around me. Often, your mentors are already in your life; you just haven't yet found a way to learn from them.

Our firefighters, they show up every day to fight fires. If, God forbid, there's a situation where they have to fight cancer, they shouldn't have to fight bureaucrats to get the care they deserve.

Of course fear does not automatically lead to courage. Injury does not necessarily lead to insight. Hardship will not automatically make us better. Pain can break us or make us wiser. Suffering can destroy us or make us stronger. Fear can cripple us, or it can make us more courageous. It is resilience that makes the difference.

Resilience is distinct from mere survival, and more than mere endurance. Resilience is often endurance with direction.

I'm an average American. As I joke, I'm the average Mexican American Jewish Italian mayor of the most diverse city in the world.

My main job and my overwhelming job starts with my family, my street, my neighborhood, and my city.

The idea of red-washing or blue-washing an entire county because a few more people vote one way or the other does a disservice to the people who live there.

I recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. And I have always recognized Jerusalem as the capital of the independent, fully sovereign Palestinian state that we all want to emerge from negotiations toward a true two-state solution.

I'm not one of those politicians, to my probably discredit, who thinks very far ahead. It has to feel right to me and not be about a careful plot and plan.

You see as mayors and local officials our jobs are designed so we have more in common with our constituents than Washington politicians can ever have.

I kind of believe that, whenever possible, you should finish the job that you set out to do.

People elect me to make sure the chief of police is the right chief of police. They elect me to make sure I have the right person running the airport.

I don't think you can lead a nation if you don't have a definition of the nation. We have to define, as Democrats, what a nation is and embrace the entire nation.

I think it's really important to talk education, to talk infrastructure, to talk good jobs and the future of work.

I think poverty is the biggest challenge for Los Angeles and for many of our cities that have come back from the recession.

Los Angeles is the strongest defender of immigrants perhaps of any city in this country.

I won't be a perfect mayor, but I will be the mayor of a great city.

I don't live life with a ton of regrets.

What I think the average person wants is not a fight; they want to see something move forward in their own neighborhood.

Campaigns are these moments of suspended animation where people usually learn how to be friends afterward.

There are two rules in politics. They say never ever be pictured with a drink in your hand, and never swear.

I have a piano in my office, and sometimes during meetings, I'll sit down and goof on the keyboard a little bit.

On things like the minimum wage, where cities as well as states are increasingly looking at income disparity, mayors will have, I think, a very strong voice.

My grandfather was an undocumented immigrant. My great-grandmother, my bisabuela, carried him over the border in her arms.