“My parents and I were all afraid of being poor – really poor.”

If there’s any lesson I’ve learned in the last five years, it’s don’t be so sure about what lies ahead. There are amazing doors that could open.

We’re Americans. We celebrate success. We just don’t want the game to be rigged.

It’s better to fight because if you don’t fight, you can’t win. Besides, even when you don’t win, you can change the game.

I’m really concerned that ‘too big to fail’ has become ‘too big for trial’.

It’s a simple idea: We all do better when we work together and invest in our future.

I have a daughter and I have granddaughters and I will never vote to let a group of backward-looking ideologues cut women’s access to birth control. We have lived in that world, and we are not going back, not ever.

My response [to fear of being poor]was to study contracts, finance, economics, to plan, to have a goal, to work on that goal. To learn everything I could. I always poked at the things that scared me most.

People feel like the system is rigged against them, and here is the painful part, they’re right. The system is rigged.

We don’t win what we don’t fight for.

College students today are drowning in debt, and it is hurting them and hurting our economy. We must find a way to help families pay for college without condemning them to a lifetime of indebtedness.

That’s how we build the economy of the future. An economy with more jobs and less debt, we root it in fairness. We grow it with opportunity. And we build it together.

We need to remind politicians they don’t work for the big banks – they work for us.

The need for comprehensive reform must not blind us to the urgency of addressing the massive debt that’s already crushing our young people.

Balancing your money is the key to having enough.

We should be talking about expanding Social Security benefits – not cutting them.

Pundits talk about ‘populist rage’ as a way to trivialize the anger and fear coursing through the middle class.

He who possesses most must be most afraid of loss.

I’m not afraid of death because I don’t believe in it. It’s just getting out of one car, and into another.

It’s lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges, and I believed in myself.

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out.

God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.

Don’t be afraid to be yourself just because you’re not like everybody else in class.

To bring about change, you must not be afraid to take the first step. We will fail when we fail to try.

How much I missed, simply because I was afraid of missing it.