I'd rather we were rebuilding Philadelphia, as opposed to Kabul...There are American cities with serious infrastructure problems and we're not addressing them.

I believe in infrastructure, I believe in investing in your hard assets. Where I think government starts to fail is when it starts getting itself weighed down with the social programs. And I think the American public just feels like a lot of that money is tossed aside and wasted.

We need a better strategy for poor people...because what we're doing isn't working.

If your city's being populated by highly educated twentysomething s with choices, you're probably going to succeed.

The bottom line is that we have entered an age when local communities need to invest in themselves. Federal and state dollars are becoming more and more scarce for American cities. Political and civic leaders in local communities need to make a compelling case for this investment.

People look for their leadership to lead.

Donald Trump is in a partisan election, so he views the role differently than Mitch Landrieu and I who are are trying to lead our cities in a bipartisan or nonpartisan manner.

I've never seen a tornado and I've lived in Oklahoma City basically my whole life. It's not like we're infested with them on a continual basis. But you learn to live with the warnings. And you learn what to do if one is coming your way. And then you cross your fingers and make the best judgments you can.

When you have a lot of construction going on, it sends a message of vitality that builds up consumer confidence. It gets people to spend money when they see that energy, that things are happening.

We did such a great job of creating the interstate highway system in Oklahoma City that we don't have traffic congestion. You can actually get a speeding ticket during rush hour in the city. That's how great our traffic flows.

We had a branding problem. We have allowed ourselves to be branded by our tragedies. If you said 'Oklahoma City,' chances are the next word out of your mouth was 'bombing.'