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

I’m used to people kind of knowing me in the community.

It’s really scary or it’s easy to generate fear around an idea or around an -ism when you don’t provide any substance to it.

Democrats are a big-tent party. You know, I’m not trying to impose an ideology on all, you know, several hundred members of Congress.

Working-class Americans want a clear champion, and there is nothing radical about moral clarity in 2018.

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.

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

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’s important that we share our experiences with other people. Your story will heal you and your story will heal somebody else. When you tell your story, you free yourself and give other people permission to acknowledge their own story.

When you have to teach yourself how to say sounds, when you have to be highly concerned about pronunciation, it gives you a certain awareness of sonics, of the auditory experience.

I don’t really read a lot of newspapers. I don’t pay attention to what is being said or written about me. I’ve had lots of experiences in the past when I got too much into it. That sort of diverts your focus.

It is not your duty or responsibility to change the minds of other people. The nature of their thinking is advanced or limited by their experience. In your presence, they have an opportunity to learn about you and, perhaps, to grow.

God uses change to change us. He doesn’t use it to destroy us or to distract us, but to coax us to the next level of character, experience, compassion and destiny!

I love to hold people’s hands when I visit hospitals, even though they are shocked because they haven’t experienced anything like it before, but to me it is a normal thing to do.

From my experience of having served for 3000 days, I can say that anything can be achieved.

Every experience in your life is being orchestrated to teach you something you need to know to move forward.