A mayor is a symbol and a public face of what a city bureaucracy provides its citizens.
John Hickenlooper

America is always attracting people, from all over the earth.
John Hickenlooper

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.
John Hickenlooper

Denver is a city that will be far more defined by its future than its past.
John Hickenlooper

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.
John Hickenlooper

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.
John Hickenlooper

From my subjective position, there was no honeymoon.
John Hickenlooper

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.
John Hickenlooper

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.
John Hickenlooper

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.
John Hickenlooper

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.
John Hickenlooper

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.
John Hickenlooper

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.
John Hickenlooper

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.
John Hickenlooper

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.
John Hickenlooper

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.
John Hickenlooper

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.
John Hickenlooper

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.
John Hickenlooper

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.
John Hickenlooper

The most important thing a mayor does is hire talented people to run the city.
John Hickenlooper