We shouldn't be profiting from our students who are drowning in debt while giving a great deal to the banks. That's just wrong.
— Elizabeth Warren
My brothers and I grew up on stories about our grandfather building one-room schoolhouses and about our grandparents' courtship and their early lives together in Indian Territory.
People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love, and they die. And that matters.
I will work my heart out to earn the trust of the people of Massachusetts.
If the notion on this is we're going to elect somebody to the United States Senate so they can be the 100th least senior person in there and be polite, and somewhere in their fourth or fifth year do some bipartisan bill that nobody cares about, don't vote for me.
Writing laws based on an abstract theory, rather than reality, is a dangerous undertaking.
If you don't talk about families, then it's easy to disembody subprime mortgages and asset securitization and unemployment rates without remembering that every one of those numbers is a million families.
Credit cards are like snakes: Handle 'em long enough, and one will bite you.
G.E. doesn't pay any taxes, and we are asking college kids to take on even more debt to get an education and asking seniors to get by on less. These aren't just economic questions. These are moral questions.
We cannot run a democracy without a strong middle class.
I was a Republican because I thought that those were the people who best supported markets. I think that is not true anymore. I was a Republican at a time when I felt like there was a problem that the markets were under a lot more strain. It worried me whether or not the government played too activist a role.
Growing up, my mother and grandparents often talked about our family's Native American heritage. As a kid, I never thought to ask them for documentation - what kid would?
I know what I am in Washington to do: I'm here to fight for hardworking families.
The core of my career is my teaching and my writing.
And 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.
Mitt Romney is the guy who said corporations are people. No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people.
Me, I was waiting tables of 13 and married at 19. I graduated from public schools, and taught elementary school.
If large financial institutions can break the law and accumulate million in profits - and, if they get caught, settle by paying out of those profits - they do not have much incentive to follow the law.
Republicans say they don't believe in government. Sure they do. They believe in government to help themselves and their powerful friends.
I have to prove myself to everybody.
I learned early on what debt means, how vulnerable it makes people, what the security of owning a home means.
All I can say is I was a lot more discreet as a candidate than I was in real life. Can I say that? Maybe it's indiscreet to talk about discretion.
I graduated law school nine months pregnant and didn't take a job.
I don't want happy-face conclusions. I want the truth.
I think a lot of Americans are not sure which side Washington is on: the side of banks or the side of the people.
There's been such a sense that there's one set of rules for trillion-dollar financial institutions and a different set for all the rest of us. It's so pervasive that it's not even hidden.
The word's out: I'm a woman, and I'm going to have trouble backing off on that. I am what I am. I'll go out and talk to people about what's happening to their families, and when I do that, I'm a mother. I'm a grandmother.
America's middle class is getting hammered, and Washington is rigged to work for the big guy.
It doesn't make me happy to go back and talk about how great high school was.
We can't go out and tell ourselves we've done good if we haven't.
I grew up in the Methodist church and taught Sunday school, and one of my favorite passages of scripture is, 'in as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.' Matthew 25:40.
President Obama believes in a country where we invest in education, in roads and bridges, in science, and in the future so we can create new opportunities so the next kid can make it big and the kid afer that and the kid after that, that's what President Obama believes.
Americans are fighters. We're tough, resourceful and creative, and if we have the chance to fight on a level playing field, where everyone pays a fair share and everyone has a real shot, then no one - no one can stop us.
Like a lot of you, I grew up in a family on the ragged edges of the middle class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had a heart attack, my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our house.
I'm really concerned that too-big-to-fail has become too-big-for-trial.
We're Americans. We celebrate success. We just don't want the game to be rigged.
I'm willing to throw my body in front of the bus to stop bad ideas.
The 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act will reestablish a wall between commercial and investment banking, make our financial system more stable and secure, and protect American families.
I had to make a choice - recede into the academic world, or wade into politics.
I was 30 before I realized, you know, that I probably was an accident. These things just suddenly hit you one day.
You have to remember: what are incomes to banks are outgoes to families.
We need a new model: If you can't explain it, you can't sell it.
America had been a boom-and-bust economy going into the Great Depression - just over and over and over, fortunes were wiped out, ordinary families were crushed under it.
I'm not going to talk about who I voted for.
I never sought nor gained personal benefit in school or job applications based on my heritage.
I was in a high school where everybody was a click better off.
I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years, and I was really casting about, thinking, 'What am I going to do?' My husband's view of it was, 'Stay home... We'll have more children; you'll love this.' And I was very restless about it.
Are you ready to fight for good jobs and and a solid level playing field? Are you ready to prove to another generation of Americans that we can build a better country and a newer world? Joe Biden is ready. Barack Obama is ready. I am ready. You're ready.
President Obama believes in a level playing field.
People feel like the system is rigged against them, and here is the painful part, they're right. The system is rigged.
