A biography for Bill de Blasiohasn’t been written yet.
“I know the ugly history of corporate welfare, and that's not New York City's future.”
“For decades, Big Oil ravaged our environment. They knew what they were peddling was lethal, but they didn't care. They used the classical Big Tobacco playbook of denial, denial, denial, and all the while, they did everything to hook society on their lethal product.”
“There is a heavy-ego, solitary model of being an elected leader. We've certainly seen that in some other mayors of this city... I have much more of a Movement mentality. It's much more of what I'm steeped in. I don't think it is first and foremost about me. It's about the ideas and the agenda.”
“The common belief is that you are either a dreamer or a realist. But idealism and pragmatism aren't as far apart as one might think.”
“I've spent my life at public work, and I've spent many a day on a good cause that didn't have any lift, didn't have enough support, didn't have enough resources, and you could only get so far.”
“My parents were divorced when I was young. I was really brought up by my mother's side of the family.”
“I am very much a Red Sox fan; I can name you more players than you could possibly imagine. It's just part of who I am.”
“As N.Y.C. Public Advocate, I released a report that showed that stop-and-frisks of African Americans in 2012 were barely half as likely to yield a weapon as those of white New Yorkers - and a third less likely to yield contraband. Despite this evidence, the vast majority of those stopped are young black and Latino men.”
“I think small business is struggling in New York City. It's a fantastic market, it's a very appealing market, there's lots of opportunity, at the same time it's a very difficult place to build a small business.”
“In a lot of ways, New York isn't the city I moved to back in 1979. I'm old enough to separate my nostalgia for those days from the reality of how dangerous and uncertain they could be.”
“I was always very detail-oriented, and in the time I spent in different roles - the elected official, the campaign manager - I had a tendency to want to push the creation of the product and really work on the critical path that would get to product.”