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. ”