“I consider myself a progressive. I have a passion for people who work. To me, this is about forward looking versus backward looking. Ideological gradations are the wrong way to look at it.”

I’ve never been in a place where winning has hurt the ability to do anything.

You have a burden going into any campaign when you’re raising money to fund that effort because there’s always a desire to spend more money than you have.

When people told me ‘It’s great to be here’, they meant at the house, not with me.

Under Superintendent Johnson’s leadership, our police department is on a path to earn the respect of every community in the City of Chicago.

Israel has a security concern involving geography. But geography does not have the same value it did in 1967.

A strong economy depends on a strong middle class, but George Bush has put the middle class in a hole, and John McCain has a plan to keep digging that hole with George Bush’s shovel.

As individuals, we will be judged in our lives by the totality of our actions. Not one thing will stand out. And I think that’s how we get judged by our colleagues and that’s how we get judged by the good lord.

It is one thing to train officers on fighting crime. It is a whole other thing to train them to build friendships and relationships, which are integral to fighting crime. This takes time, effort, and patience on the part of police officers.

We can define the rules of police-citizen engagement, but everyday decisions will always be made by men and women in uniform, on the street, in the community, under extreme pressure, in a dangerous world where guns easily fall into the wrong hands.

I believe the record I was allowed to help establish by the side of the president was important.

Because of the president’s leadership, every American will have access to affordable, quality health care.

I sometimes joke, Paula, even paranoid people have enemies.

For all the things that make Chicago great, for all the things that make us proud to call ourselves Chicagoans, the violence that is happening corrodes our core. It is not the Chicago we know and love.

In the White House, you can be on the pitcher’s mound or you can be in the catcher’s position. Put points on the board. Show people you can govern. Deliver on what you said you were going to deliver on.

When it comes to federal elections law, Tom DeLay and his special-interest friends live by one set of rules, and everyone else lives by a very different set.

The American people want change. They want big ideas, big reform.

If you were very bright and you became head of a department, as I did, of the psychology department, you were encouraged to go on to graduate work. But as a women you didn’t even think about discrimination.

He who graduates the harshest school, succeeds.

While I had been, I guess, quite brilliant, academically, in my college years, I also had been editor of the paper, and I loved that. And, that was a much more active thing. And I missed it when I was doing graduate work.

At my graduation, I thought we had to marry what we wished to become. Now you are becoming the men you once would have wished to marry.

I fell in love with theater there, and after graduation I moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting.

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

I knew that when I left there at the age of 18, I wouldn’t be back. And it was common knowledge among all the people there that when you graduate from high school here, you go to college or go get a job or something and do it on your own.

After graduating, I began auditioning for films while continuing to model. I did a few fashion shows, ad shoots, and even got a few Bollywood offers, but nothing great.