“Me, I was waiting tables of 13 and married at 19. I graduated from public schools, and taught elementary school.”

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.

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.

We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century – for several centuries.

I think about the milestones from my childhood and what it will be like to watch our kids go through them. Taking Riley to her first day of school was a whirlwind. I can’t imagine what middle school is going to be like, and high school, and graduation.

Remember, half the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their class.

Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction.

Curiosity is the key to creativity.

Don’t work for fools. It’s not worth it.

There’s few things that get you over your own crap more than working hard.

Of course there’s a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don’t take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates.