Mayor Laguardia Quotes

the Beaux Arts building’s grand Corinthian columns and its three immense archways. Two majestic marble lions served as bookends. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia had named them Patience and Fortitude during the depths of the Great Depression in an effort to inspire his beleaguered New Yorkers, and Lacy had adopted them as her personal mascots. She looked to them now for the answers she sought, but Patience and Fortitude weren’t talking.

As the story goes, during LaGuardia’s stint as judge, a little old lady who had stolen a loaf of bread for her starving grandchildren was brought into court. The fine was either ten dollars (a considerable sum in those post-Depression days) or ten days in jail. Surmising the woman’s destitute situation, Mayor LaGuardia reached into his pocket and paid the fine himself, and then passed a hat around, stating, “I’m fining everyone in this courtroom fifty cents for living in a city where a person has to steal bread in order to eat.” The old woman went home with $47.50 in her purse and hope shining in her eyes. Mayor LaGuardia demonstrated compassion at its finest in that courtroom. Compassion is empathetic willingness to enter someone else’s distress. To not only share their suffering, but take it one step further in attempting to alleviate it.