Eric Garcetti

“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.”

“No sane person would run for president, right?”

“I have to spend my time worrying about poor families at the expense of helping businesses, or vice versa. To me, I really see that's the bridge I need to build.”

“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.”

“I have an incredible compass. You can put me back in a country I haven't been in 20 years and say, 'Get me from point A to point B,' and I'll take you there.”

“I want to be high-profile with the average Angeleno. I want to be out there holding office hours on a curb in Boyle Heights.”

“When President Trump got out of the Paris climate accords, we got 412 cities to say we will do it instead, because we're on the front line with our firefighters dealing with historic fires and floods.”

“L.A. is a great city to get lost in. The best thing to do is to drive in any direction, find a strip mall, and go from one store to the next. I guarantee you will see a collision of cultures you never imagined.”

“I think, for me, the biggest issue is poverty in general, poverty in this time of plenty. It's reflected in homelessness. It's reflected in educational gaps. It's reflected in racial disparities.”

“The reason I like Steve Aoki is because I can trace my love of electronic music all the way back to when I was listening to not just new wave but to YMO [Yellow Magic Orchestra] which, to me, was the ultimate Japanese band and launched synth electronic music.”

“I'm in what feels like a pretty transparent fishbowl as mayor. People see you at the market, people see you at the diner, people see you wherever you are, talk to you. You don't shave, they're taking selfies of you. You come back from your jog, they're talking to you.”

“In Washington, you have imaginary problems, and they can't even solve the imaginary problems.”

“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.”

“My wife and I are foster parents.”

“I always thought Grover Cleveland was from Cleveland.”

“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.”

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

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

“When it comes to public safety, I listen to police chiefs and cops, not to a cable-news station.”

“I don't want to bring a European city or an east-coast city to the West Coast.”