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

This country isn’t working for working people. It’s working only for people at the top. That’s not the American dream. That’s the American nightmare.

The people who are filing for bankruptcy in increasing numbers every year, it’s not the poorest. It’s not the people at the economic fringes. It’s people who worked hard and played by the rules.

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.

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.

Be the reason someone smiles. Be the reason someone feels loved and believes in the goodness in people.

I don’t feel like I’m in competition with anybody. If I’m worried about beating somebody else, I’m not going to be the best version of myself. It shouldn’t be a competition because somebody else winning is not going to make me lose.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

I love the fact that I can make people happy, in any form. Even if it’s just an hour of their lives, if I can make them feel lucky or make them feel good, or bring a smile to a sour face, that to me is worthwhile.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there’s work to be done.

I don’t really feel like I done made it all the way. I feel like, ‘OK, we did this. Then we grinded enough to get to this point. Now we gotta grind enough to get bigger and bigger,’ you know?

In terms of love, you’re not in control and I hate that feeling. I seem to write a lot of sad songs because I’m a very tragic person. But there’s always an element of humor at the end.