Ben Weinstein’s Reviews > City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York > Status Update

244: "Roosevelt and La Guardia did possess outstanding personal qualities. But this does not fully account for how they came to loom so large in the public life of the nation and the city. ...Roosevelt and La Guardia acquired charisma because events rendered them capable of accomplishing governmental feats that seemed beyond the ability of ordinary mortals."

201: "Roosevelt had initially conceived [of the Federal One projects] simply as a way to create jobs for a set of particularly hard-hit occupational groups: artists 'have to live,' he remarked; 'I guess the only thing they can do is paint and surely there must be some public place where paintings are wanted.'"

125: "Too often life in New York is merely a squalid succession of days," [La Guardia] said in one campaign speech, "whereas in fact it can be a great, living, thrilling adventure."

Didn't know this was what Eric Adams was riffing on when he said this: https://youtu.be/wSq9SJzSRUA?si=vVatz...