Leans Quotes

You've heard New Orleans is poor... Well, it's poor because the government lets it be that way. The minimum wage is $5.25 an hour. You can't live on that. - Francisco Lopez

You've got to look at very long-term impacts, with people out of their homes for months or years. The magnitude of the population displaced is very troubling. You look at 'OK, how many of our hospitals might be functioning?' There are pockets of New Orleans that still don't have power. Where do you move these people if you have to move them? We don't have answers right now. - Rob Harper

You're not going to be sure what it is that's going to be exported. But New Orleans guys will at least have a healthy influence on what goes on in other places. - Dan Morgenstern

You're looking at a data center that runs 2 percent of the Internet... That's quite a task to back it up. We have backup tapes, but they're all onsite here in New Orleans. We're still in the process of migrating to a new data center. - Michael Barnett

You wouldn't believe what's happening here. Helicopters have been landing every 10 minutes, 24 hours a day. Half of New Orleans is now living in Baton Rouge and there's no room to move. A guy I know couldn't sell his house for six months and he got 14 offers in one day. - Christopher Hannie

You will hear conflicting reports coming out of (Yugoslavia), all of it designed to get American attention away from the ethnic cleansing. - Cherif Bassiouni

You think people are homeless now, this city is really going to be homeless then. Nobody's going to have nowhere to go. You can't go back to New Orleans. - William Jones

You still see the city is very alive and you've got a lot of great citizens of New Orleans committed to rebuilding this city that are just so excited about Saints football. In times of tragedy, in times like this, people look to whatever they can to try to lift their spirits and I think for a lot of people that is Saints football. ... What a great opportunity it was for me to be here as quarterback, but not only that, but as a person in this community. - Drew Brees

You say you were surprised by the fact that so many people didn't make it out. It's no surprise to anyone that you had at least 100,000 people in the city of New Orleans who are dirt poor, who don't have cars, who don't have access to public transportation, who don't have any way to get out of the city simply just because someone says there is a Force 5 hurricane coming, you ought to get out. If you didn't have the buses there to get them out, why should it be a surprise to you that they stayed? - Ted Koppel

You really find out what's important in life. The things that I was worried about when I was living in New Orleans and everything was OK are really trivial compared to what really matters. - Jonathan Ruffin