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EVERETT — In a winding stump speech that linked casino hotel development to Maya Angelou and the origins of life, Las Vegas magnate Steve Wynn campaigned in person Friday for his proposed $1.2 billion gambling resort on the Mystic River.

Addressing a friendly crowd of a couple of hundred people at the Everett Armory, Wynn was light on new details — nothing about traffic mitigation plans, for instance — but heavy on imagery and passion. He walked the crowd through two new renderings of the project and then veered into a long expla­nation of his philosophy of building design.

Paraphrasing Angelou — though attributing the quote to Nelson Mandela — Wynn said: “They’ll forget what you said, they’ll forget what you did. But they’ll never forget how you made them feel.

“Same thing about hotels: It’s emotion. You don’t care about marble or crystal chandeliers or onyx. If those materials produce the right emotions, you use them. What really matters is what people feel.”

Everett voters will decide in a referendum June 22 if they feel comfortable allowing Wynn’s project in their city. No casino proposal can win a state license without the endorsement of its host community.

Wynn is competing for ­resort casino development rights with Suffolk Downs in East Boston and Foxwoods, which has joined a casino venture in Milford. The Everett vote next month is expected to be the first binding casino referendum since the state’s casino law was passed in 2011.

Wynn has built several of the most expensive hotels on the Las Vegas Strip, such as Bellagio and Mirage. In his remarks Friday, Wynn said that grand hotels have become too costly to build in most great cities. “The price that people pay for just rooms is not enough to justify the tremendous cost of construction these days,” he said.

“We build fanciful hotels ­because we can have . . . casinos to pay for them,” he said, drawing chuckles from the crowd. “That’s what I like about casinos. They allow us to build fanciful and unusual food, beverage, entertainment, convention, and hospitality places.

“I’ve been doing it all my life, and I can’t tell the difference between one slot machine or another,” said Wynn. “It’s who’s in the hotel that makes the difference. . . . That’s what gets people on an airplane or to travel” to a gambling resort.

Speaking about the Everett project, Wynn said the lobby will include natural light and lots of plants, which he said trigger a primal feeling that goes back to the origins of life.

“The reason I say atrium and skylights — and all our ­hotels have these things — is that for the last 800 million years, since multicellular life appeared on this planet, the story of life on this planet is ­basically the function of three primordial forces: the energy of the sun coming through our atmo­sphere, water, and plants that make oxygen,” said Wynn.

“When I’m trying to touch people, I stick pretty close . . . to those fundamental forces of life,” he said. “So we use skylights and atriums, natural light, wherever and whenever we can. Because whether you’re aware of it or not, those elements touch you and immediately make you feel good.”

In an interview after his presentation, Wynn said, “It feels good here” in Everett. “It’s very difficult to do this if there’s a contentious environment.”

Wynn would know. In 2012, he campaigned for several months to build support for a casino in Foxborough near ­Gillette Stadium, but dropped the proposal amid fierce opposition. The political climate in Everett has been entirely different, he said. “Here, they’re glad to have us around.”