“My mother cleaned homes and drove school buses, and when my family was on the brink of foreclosure… I started bartending and waitressing.”

Congress is too old. They don’t have a stake in the game.

We have a political culture of intimidation, of favoring, of patronage, and of fear, and that is no way for a community to be governed.

The way the Queens Democratic party machine has worked, they operate on a politics of exclusion.

I want to speak to people directly as much as possible.

I just hope that more people will ignore the fatalism of the argument that we are beyond repair. We are not beyond repair. We are never beyond repair.

I understand the pain of working-class Americans because I have experienced the pain.

It’s not just that I’m a woman of color running for office. It’s the way that I ran. It’s the way that my identity formed my methods.

I believe that every American should have stable, dignified housing; health care; education – that the most very basic needs to sustain modern life should be guaranteed in a moral society.

Mentors of mine were under a big pressure to minimize their femininity to make it. I’m not going to do that. That takes away my power. I’m not going to compromise who I am.

We know enough to reject the stereotype that people in the Midwest do not care about their brothers and sisters.

We are fighting for an unapologetic movement for economic, social, and racial justice in the United States.

I don’t think any person in America should die because they are too poor to live.

It is unacceptable to be disrespectful of Congressman Crowley. He’s done some phenomenal, phenomenal work for the Bronx and Queens.

We have to stick to the message: What are we proposing to the American people? Not, ‘What are we fighting against?’

Our democracy is designed to speak truth to power.

There is no such thing as talking about class without there being implications of the racial history of the United States. You just can’t do it.

We don’t really have any big family traditions; just spending time with each other is the most important part.

Friendships are the family we make – not the one we inherit. I’ve always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.

I can buy anything I want now. It hasn’t changed me personally. It just changed what I can do for myself and my family.

No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.

I believe in God, family, and McDonald’s. And in the office, that order is reversed.