Quotes from Lori Lightfoot

Police departments, since the start of the history of this country, have been used to enforce unconstitutional laws that were designed to discriminate against communities of color and particularly African Americans.

And I would like to have a good, productive relationship with members of the City Council, but I'm not going to allow them to undermine what the people's choice was and what the people want, which is change.

I don't think I'll be a good mayor if I don't live my authentic life, and that's got to be involved with having fun with my spouse and my daughter.

Chicago is an incredibly great city, but it was clear to me that greatness wasn't being spread to all our neighborhoods.

Make no mistake about it: Change is hard, but change is necessary.

Fundamentally, we need to make sure that our neighborhoods are safe - all of our neighborhoods.

Both my brothers played football. My mother had season tickets as a school board member. I was in the band, my sister was in the band. The thing was, the unifying civic activity was obsession over high school football.

It's true that not every day a little black girl in a low-income family from a segregated steel town makes the runoff to be the mayor of the third-largest city in America.

Look, there's no question that we have a challenge with gun violence. But there's a lot more nuanced parts of that narrative, and that's the part that I think that we have to make sure that we emphasize along with all the great things that are going on in Chicago, particularly in our neighborhoods.

When young people grow up with fear as the norm, they don't have the luxury to dream.

Fundamentally, if people don't feel like their lives are valued and they don't value their lives, they're not going to value their neighbors' lives.

When I was in my 20s and kind of going through my own coming out process, I feared that I would lose my family. I feared that I would grow old alone. And that was a real part of my struggle.

I grew up in a small segregated steel town 6o miles outside of Cleveland, my parents grew up in the segregated south. As a family we struggled financially, and I grew up in the '60s and '70s where overt racism ruled the day.

I've wanted to be a parent for a really long time, and I'm going to make sure I'm doing everything I can to be present in her life, to be her mother. I don't want to be absent from her life.

It's going very different for citizens of Chicago to know that they have an advocate in the mayor's office - getting rid of the 'us versus them,' the lack of investment in our neighborhoods, the feeling that the only thing that matters is if you're a campaign donor.

So, yes, I became the vessel into which people poured their hopes that we can have a different kind of city. I recognize that, but in politics, sometimes it's good to be lucky.

If you really want to make a difference you don't do it via Tweet, via Facebook, via Instagram - you get down, you understand what the facts are and then you offer a path forward.

If aldermen are doing their job right, they should be the ones who are closest to the vibe and the beat in their neighborhood and have a very important role to play on a number of different issues, but not a unilateral, unchecked right. That's gone as soon as I take office.

Police can't be successful if they're not viewed as legitimate by the community, and a community will not be safe if the police are not engaged in a respectful, constitutional partnership with the community.

We have been embarked on what I would call a proactive strategy that looks at our gun violence as a public health crisis, which is what it is. That means we look at the root causes of the violence.