Richard Lamm People Quotations

Why give chemotherapy or even antibiotics to people with end-stage Alzheimer's disease? Keep them pain free and clean, love them but don't automatically try to get the last technology-produced breath from them. Start a preschool program instead or do something about the atrocious state of obesity in our children.

'Diversity' is a wonderfully seductive word. It stresses differences rather than commonalities. Diverse people worldwide are mostly engaged in hating each other - that is, when they are not killing each other. A 'diverse,' peaceful or stable society is against most historical precedent.

The bottom line is, until we're helping people to stop smoking, screening for breast cancer, giving Pap smears, giving prenatal care to pregnant women, we should not go into publicly paying for the artificial heart, which will benefit at great cost only a few people.

I think modern societies have to ask a very basic question: What strategies buy the most health for people? Doctors can do so many marvelous things now. They can keep a corpse alive, almost.

We spend billions on marginal and often unnecessary procedures on people who are in the final dying process, yet we leave millions of Americans out of the health insurance system, and America's kids have the worst dental health in the developed world.

Employers love cheap labor, but a country should train its own people.

I think we're rapidly approaching the day where medical science can keep people alive in hospitals, hooked up to tubes and things, far beyond when any kind of quality of life is left at all.

With the mayor, people recognize that illegal immigrants are so ubiquitous in our society that it could happen to anybody. You hire a lawn crew, someone to come in and redo your basement, who knows what you'll get.

I have no permanent enemies - only people I have yet to persuade.

The biggest challenge of public policy is to know when and how the world has changed. We are no longer an empty continent with endless absorptive capacity. We have a cash-wage economy that is having terrible problems finding jobs for its own people. The concern about immigration is not nativism but common sense.