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Vince Gill
Country Music Hall of Fame
One of the guys in the band was a guy named Tony Brown, who also used to play with Elvis. He was a piano player, and he played with Rodney and Rosanne, and he was also an A&R guy for RCA Records in Nashville. He said, "Man, you need to start making country records!" And so he signed me to RCA in 1983, and I made my first record and not much happened. I made my second record and not much happened. I made my third record and not much happened. And then I got another chance. I moved over to MCA Records a few years later and got another opportunity. You know, I really am grateful for the years of struggle in looking back. I think at the time it was hard, because you feel like you're beating your head against the walls, saying, "Why isn't this working?" You know? Well, maybe if you go around the wall you know, so I found some way to go around the wall. In hindsight, I think all those years of struggle was a humbling experience.
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Rudolph Giuliani
Former Mayor of New York City
The first time I ran, I lost by two percent, and the second time I ran, I won by two percent, and then I got reelected by a much larger number. But maybe the fact that so many people told me it couldn't be done challenged me. I'd go talk to people about, "Should I run for mayor?" and they would tell me, "You're crazy. You can't. You're a Republican. A Republican can't get elected. Being a mayor is a thankless job. The city's unmanageable, the city's ungovernable." Even books were written with those titles, "New York City is Ungovernable," "New York City is Unmanageable." Maybe there's something about my personality, but the more people told me that, the more I wanted to do it. It didn't make sense to me that the city was unmanageable or ungovernable. Nothing is unmanageable or ungovernable.
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Rudolph Giuliani
Former Mayor of New York City
Rudolph Giuliani: Well, I very much subscribe to the "Broken Windows" theory, a theory that was developed by Professors Wilson and Kelling, 25 years ago maybe. The idea of it is that you had to pay attention to small things, otherwise they would get out of control and become much worse. And that, in fact, in a lot of our approach to crime, quality of life, social programs, we were allowing small things to get worse rather than dealing with them at the earliest possible stage. That approach had been tried in other cities, but all small cities, and there was a big debate about whether it could work in a city as large as New York. One of the ways that New York used to resist any kind of change was to say, "It can't work here," because they wanted to keep the status quo. There is such a desire for people to do that, to keep the status quo. And I thought, "Well, there's no reason why it can't work in New York City. We have bigger resources. We may have bigger problems, we have bigger resources, the same theory should work." So we started paying attention to the things that were being ignored. Aggressive panhandling, the squeegee operators that would come up to your car and wash the window of your car whether you wanted it or not -- and sometimes smashed people's cars or tires or windows -- the street-level drug-dealing; the prostitution; the graffiti, all these things that were deteriorating the city. So we said, "We're going to pay attention to that," and it worked. It worked because we not only got a big reduction in that, and an improvement in the quality of life, but massive reductions in homicide, and New York City turned from the crime capital of America to the safest large city in the country for five, six years in a row.
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Whoopi Goldberg
Actress and Activist
When I was a kid they didn't call it dyslexia. They called it you know, you were slow, or you were retarded, or whatever. And so, I learned from a guy who was running a program who I met one day and he had written out on a board a sentence. And I said to him, "You know, I can't read that." And he said, "Why not"? And I said, "Because it doesn't make any sense to me." So he said, "Well, write down what you see under each. Whatever you see, write exactly what you see underneath." And so, he brought me to letters by coordinating what I saw to something called an A, or a B, or a C, or a D, and that was pretty cool.
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Whoopi Goldberg
Actress and Activist
I went to the bathroom once and people followed me in, and a lady put her hand up under the stall with a pen and a piece of paper, wanted my autograph. I said, could I just finish what I'm doing first? So sometimes people just forget, or they grab you and they don't realize that, you know, you're a person that feels. They grab my hair. People grab my hair and go, Whoopi!! And not realize that I don't mind saying hello, but hey! That hurt, you know. Or when you're rushing, or you're preoccupied and you just can't stop. People aren't always understanding. And so you feel bad because you don't want them to think ill of you. And you come to a place where you say, "You know what? Too bad. I have to go." So that's kind of tough.
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