Bill de Blasio

Sometimes, history sneaks up on you. And sometimes you know it's coming.

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.

Clearly, Mayor Bloomberg did some things right. I think he did a very good job on public health. He did a very good job on environment. I think he was right to achieve mayoral control of education. I don't think he then applied it the right way.

Excessive stop-and-frisk divides communities. That's why the New York City Police Department has moved away from it.

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.

My professional life has been about public service. My personal life I define very intently through my family.

Going back to high school and college, I believed I would be involved in public service. I literally could not conceptualize anything else.

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.

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.

Part of how you grapple with intense opposition is by creating real, organic momentum: by actually doing something for people, and then they rightfully buy into it.

Our country has a painful history of mistrust between police departments and people of color. The overuse of stop-and-frisk has made those divisions much worse.

I think a lot of the best ideas come from the grassroots; I'm someone who does not like a bunker mentality and does not like groupthink.