We'll rebuild, of course, ... But what made New Orleans is the polyglot, the tapestry, the mosaic, the gumbo. So the French Quarter gets most of the attention, but the Quarter feeds from the arteries of the neighborhoods.

We stand ready to work together, where possible, in helping rebuild not only homes and businesses, but most importantly, lives of those who so desperately need our help.

We are going to rebuild New Orleans more or less where it is, so we start out with a lot of constraints on the process, ... It is time to put a lot of interesting ideas in the hopper, but it is certainly clear that pre-conceived ideological notions ... are going to prove lacking.

At one point, early on, some public figures even asked whether it 'made sense' to rebuild New Orleans. Would you let your own mother die because it didn't make financial sense to spend the money to treat her, or because you were too busy to spend the time to heal her sick spirit?

People don't really understand that a lot of those people are not going back to New Orleans. You don't rebuild ghettos.

We have to remember that Dr. King was not an idle dreamer. Dr. King was a man of action. If Dr. King were here, he would challenge us and exhort us.