“A good education is a foundation for a better future.”

“A pension is nothing more than deferred compensation.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“America's middle class is getting hammered, and Washington is rigged to work for the big guy.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Bankruptcy exposes the economic vulnerability and insecurity of middle class women.”

“Bankruptcy is about financial death and financial rebirth. Bankruptcy is the great American story rewritten. We're a nation of debtors.”

“Banks were once places to hold money and were very careful in lending to finance families as they built a future - bought homes, bought cars, took out student loans.”

“Because policymakers often rely on think tanks' research when crafting laws and regulations, it's critical to know whether these organizations are truly independent.”

“Big corporations have money and power to make sure every rule breaks their way; people have voices and votes to push back.”

“Citigroup has a lot of money, it spends a lot of money, and it uses that money to grow and consolidate power. And it pays off.”

“Consumer banking - selling debt to middle class families - has been a gold mine.”

“Consumers get used to reading and understanding their credit card contracts, their mortgages, their check overdraft agreements, those are good things. That puts power back in the hands of consumers.”

“Cops on the beat can stop problems before the damage spreads.”

“Credit card agreements run as long as 30 pages, and it's 30 pages of largely incomprehensible text.”

“Credit cards are like snakes: Handle 'em long enough, and one will bite you.”

“Democrats fought to get health insurance for more Americans. Democrats fought for a strong consumer agency so big banks can't cheat people. We fought, we won, and we improved the lives of millions of people - thank you, President Obama!”

“Does anyone believe that Goldman Sachs is gonna give up a deal that would yield millions of dollars because someone fussed at them behind closed doors?”

“Early 2000s, we get Enron, which tells us the books are dirty. And what is our repeated response? We just keep pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric.”

“Even families with health insurance are quite vulnerable to a severe economic reversal if someone gets sick.”

“Every time the U.S. government makes a low-cost loan to someone, it's investing in them.”

“Everyone would like the world always to be in bubble times. But that doesn't happen.”

“Families rely on financial services more than ever, but those who need them most - who struggle to make ends meet - too often must contend with sky-high interest rates and tricks and traps buried in the fine print of their loan products.”

“For many women, the on-time payments of domestic support obligations are essential to economic survival.”

“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.”

“Going to college and finding a good job no longer guarantee economic safety.”

“Groupthink can become a serious issue - old ideas stay around after they're useful, and new ideas too often don't get a fair hearing.”

“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?”

“Homeowners refinance their loans when interest rates go down. Businesses refinance their loans.”

“How do you think we build a future? I think we build it by investing in our kids and investing in education.”

“I do not understand how it is that financial institutions could think that they could take taxpayer money and then turn around and act like it's business as usual. I don't understand how they can't see that the world has changed in a fundamental way, that it is not business as usual when you take taxpayer dollars.”

“I don't think anyone went the polls and said, 'I am casting my vote to make sure that Wall Street has better chances to make bigger profits off the backs of the American people.'”

“I don't want happy-face conclusions. I want the truth.”

“I don't want to go to Washington to be a co-sponsor of some bland little bill nobody cares about. I don't want to go to Washington to get my name on something that makes small change at the margin.”

“I get heartfelt thanks from all kinds of people. Today I heard from a waitress in Georgia who has lost her job and is trying to figure out how her local bank can change the terms on her credit card, and I heard from a physicist at a major research university who wants to explain a better theory of financial stress tests.”

“I graduated law school nine months pregnant and didn't take a job.”

“I grew up in a family that nearly lost everything, but I ended up in the United States Senate because I grew up in an America that invested in kids like me and built a real future for us.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I had to make a choice - recede into the academic world, or wade into politics.”

“I have to prove myself to everybody.”

“I have voted against only one of President Obama's nominees: Michael Froman, a Citigroup alumnus who is currently storming the halls of Congress as U.S. Trade Representative pushing trade deals that threaten to undermine financial regulation, workers' rights, and environmental protections.”

“I hear all this, you know, 'Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.' No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own - nobody.”

“I held my father's hand while he died of cancer, and it's really painful when you do something like that up close and personal. My mother was already gone, and I was very, very close to my father.”

“I know what I am in Washington to do: I'm here to fight for hardworking families.”

“I learned early on what debt means, how vulnerable it makes people, what the security of owning a home means.”

“I learned something important in my race against Senator Brown: voters want political leaders who are willing to break the partisan gridlock. They want fewer closed-door roadblocks and more public votes on legislation that could improve their lives.”

“I loved teaching, but every day that I went to work, I carried the worry that I was hurting my kids because I wasn't at home with them.”

“I made it real clear to the business community - if your plan for innovation is to trick people, is to fool them, is not to tell them the truth about the price, then you're right: I'm going to be right in the way.”

“I never sought nor gained personal benefit in school or job applications based on my heritage.”

“I pay for homeowner's insurance, I pay for car insurance, I pay for health insurance.”

“I think a lot of Americans are not sure which side Washington is on: the side of banks or the side of the people.”

“I think I grew up with a profound sense of watching people who were good people, who were smart people, who were hardworking people - God, nobody on this Earth worked harder than my mom and dad - and they had very little.”

“I want millionaires and billionaires and Big Oil companies to pay their fair share.”

“I was 30 before I realized, you know, that I probably was an accident. These things just suddenly hit you one day.”

“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.”

“I was in a high school where everybody was a click better off.”

“I will work my heart out to earn the trust of the people of Massachusetts.”

“If Federal Reserve loans are subsidies, it doesn't show up in the federal budget.”

“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.”

“If President Barack Obama had not been in the White House, we would not have the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau today.”

“If the big banks expect to buy influence when they give money to favored think tanks, then the public has a right to know. If the big banks don't expect to buy influence and are merely making charitable contributions, then their shareholders have a right to know. Either way, there's no excuse for keeping these payments secret.”

“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.”

“If there had been a Financial Product Safety Commission in place 10 years ago, the current financial crisis would have been averted.”

“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.”

“If your plan is to put a product out there that people can see and understand, then by golly, we're going to get along just fine.”

“I'll work with anyone - and I really do mean that - Democrat, Republican, independent, Libertarian, contrarian, vegetarian.”

“I'm not a Washington person.”

“I'm not going to talk about who I voted for.”

“I'm not running for president.”

“I'm really concerned that too-big-to-fail has become too-big-for-trial.”

“I'm willing to throw my body in front of the bus to stop bad ideas.”

“In 1978, we adopted a new Bankruptcy Code in the United States, and a principal part of this was designed to adjust to the new corporation, to find ways to let a corporation that had gotten into financial trouble reorganize itself. A big part of the selling point on this bankruptcy law was, 'It will preserve jobs.'”

“In America today, a young person needs more education after high school just to have a chance to make it in the middle class. Not a guarantee, just a chance to make it.”

“In the 1960s, a minimum wage job would keep a family of three afloat.”

“It doesn't make me happy to go back and talk about how great high school was.”

“It is critical that the American people, and not just their financial institutions, be represented at the negotiating table.”

“It is easy when you are successful to think that you did it all by yourself and to forget that you didn't. You got here because a lot of things broke your way. You were lucky enough to be born into a family that could afford to take care of you well.”

“It is not good not to have health insurance; that leaves the family very vulnerable.”

“It worries me about what happens if people in government are looking for that next job: 'Yeah I'm working now, not as much money as I could be making, but when I leave here, that's where I'm headed.' That ultimately infects whatever it is that they're doing.”

“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.”

“Marathon Day in Boston and all of Massachusetts, it's Patriot's Day, and it's a big celebration for us. It's a day when we're kind of the whole world's city there.”

“Markets work when people can evaluate the prices and risks of different products, then pick the ones that work best for them. But when the terms of the deal are hidden, competition doesn't work. And customers aren't the only ones who are hurt.”

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

“'Middle class' used to be synonymous with secure, with steady, with boring, because middle-class people were people who were pretty much safe from the time they first started work on through retirement and until their deaths. No longer.”

“Mitt Romney is the guy who said corporations are people. No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people.”

“Most women file for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious medical problem, a job loss, or a family break up. It is hard to protect against those.”

“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.”

“My mother had taught me about the importance of finding a 'good provider,' so when my boyfriend proposed, I said 'yes' in a heartbeat. I was still just a kid, and I didn't know what was coming in life.”

“Never be so faithful to your plan that you are unwilling to consider the unexpected. Never be so faithful to your plan that you are unwilling to entertain the improbable opportunity that comes looking for you.”

“No matter how good a deal sounds, if your name goes on the bottom line, you need to understand it and be sure you'll be able to pay. You are responsible for yourself forever. Forever.”

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea, God Bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and paid forward for the next kid who comes along.”

“Other countries around the world make employees and retirees first in the priority. For example, in Mexico, the bankruptcy laws say if a company wants to go bankrupt... obligations to employees and retirees will have a first priority. That has an effect on every negotiation that takes place with every company in Mexico.”

“Others have said it before me. If you don't have a seat at the table, you're probably on the menu. And so it is important that we have women in the United States Senate - strong women, women who are there to help advance an agenda that is important to women.”

“Part of my job is to make sense of all that I hear, and to retell it in a forceful way so that the decision-makers at Treasury can hear it. At least that's how I see it.”

“People feel like the system is rigged against them, and here is the painful part, they're right. The system is rigged.”

“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.”

“People who graduate are more resilient financially, and they weather economic downturns better than people who don't graduate. And, throughout their lives, people who graduate are more likely to be economically secure, more likely to be healthy, and more likely to live longer. Face it: A college degree puts a lot in your corner.”

“People with banking experience haven't all flocked to the biggest banks; community banks and regional banks, along with smaller trading houses and credit unions, have some very talented people.”

“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.”

“President Obama believes in a level playing field.”

“Pundits talk about 'populist rage' as a way to trivialize the anger and fear coursing through the middle class.”

“Raising the minimum wage means we have workers paying more in to support the Social Security system.”

“Regulators all meet with Goldman Sachs executives and employees day after day after day. They don't see the people who get tricked, the people who get cheated, the people who get fooled by the products that Goldman turns out.”

“Republicans say they don't believe in government. Sure they do. They believe in government to help themselves and their powerful friends.”

“Rising student-loan debt is an economic emergency.”

“Some economists estimate that for every family that goes bankrupt, there are about 15 more who are in the same amount of financial trouble and would profit from bankruptcy but just haven't filed.”

“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.”

“The broken consumer credit market had to be repaired by making sure that consumers had the right information and could use it effectively. That meant consolidating the bloated patchwork of ineffective agencies and regulations so that a single agency could act as a voice for consumers.”

“The core of my career is my teaching and my writing.”

“The over-representation of Wall Street banks in senior government positions sends a bad message. It tells people that one - and only one - point of view will dominate economic policymaking.”

“The poor pay more, and that's one of the reasons people get trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder.”

“The Postal Service is huge - employing more than a half million people - and its history is long and complicated.”

“The women who file for bankruptcy played by all the rules, but they are still in economic freefall.”

“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.”

“There are lots of families who - who make irresponsible purchases. There are also a lot of families who have debt on credit cards because they use those credit cards to pay for medical bills.”

“There are very few people at the decision-making table to argue for minimum-wage workers. Very few people.”

“There is one thing Anthony Weiner and I agree on: there are a lot of smart, hard-working people in the financial industry.”

“There's a lot of talk coming from Citigroup about how Dodd-Frank isn't perfect. Let me say this to anyone who is listening at Citi: I agree with you. Dodd-Frank isn't perfect. It should have broken you into pieces.”

“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.”

“Thomas Piketty assembles the facts to prove a central point about trickle-down economics: Doesn't work. Never did. He has cold, hard data showing how the rich keep getting richer and how the playing field is rigged against working families.”

“Too often, people get jobs based on who they know - not what they know.”

“Truly successful lives are about family.”

“Unfair servicing practices can worsen a family's already difficult economic situation, and the injury echoes from the family to the community and ultimately throughout the economy.”

“Wall Street banks have the right to express their views to lawmakers and regulators through lobbying, but the law is clear: If they want to influence lawmakers, they must disclose their lobbying expenditures.”

“Wall Street's outsized influence in our nation's capital is something I've talked about for a long time - long before I even thought about running for office. But where I see a problem - an infestation, really - a lot of others in Washington, both Democrats and Republicans, seem to see government working just fine.”

“We all understand that we are living longer, and we are more likely to spend more years as frail, elderly people who can't work. We also recognize that the wonderful advances in medicine also come with wonderful price tags. Those are things you can't budget around.”

“We cannot run a democracy without a strong middle class.”

“We can't go out and tell ourselves we've done good if we haven't.”

“We need a new model: If you can't explain it, you can't sell it.”

“We need to align the incentives so that colleges have an incentive to keep down their costs... to graduate students on time with degrees in areas where they're going to be able to get jobs and going to be able to pay back those loans.”

“We need to hold Wall Street accountable for issuing the kinds of deceptive loans that nearly brought our economy to its knees in 2008.”

“We should stop having a conversation about cutting Social Security a little bit or a lot.”

“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.”

“We're Americans. We celebrate success. We just don't want the game to be rigged.”

“We've seen filibusters of bills and nominations that ultimately passed with 90 or more votes. Why filibuster something that has that kind of support? Just to slow down the process and keep the Senate from working.”

“We've seen filibusters to block judicial nominations, jobs bills, political transparency, ending Big Oil subsidies - you name it, there's been a filibuster.”

“What I've learned is that real change is very, very hard. But I've also learned that change is possible - if you fight for it.”

“What we collectively decide about how to bail out our economy, how to pull our economy out of a ditch and what rules we put in place to make sure this problem does not happen again, will shape our country for the next 50 years. This is it.”

“When billionaire car dealers or manufacturers pay for ambassadorships, at least they pay with money earned by selling something of value.”

“When I first started talking about running for office, a lot of people said to me, 'Don't let the consultants change you,' and I'd always assured them that I wouldn't allow it to happen. But like it or not, I had to change. Not because of a consultant, but because I started to understand the cost of a stupid mistake.”

“When people feel like, 'Lenders weren't fair with me; I don't have any responsibility to be fair with them.' If we go far enough down that line, much of the fabric of our economy starts to unravel.”

“When she was 16, my grandmother, Hannie Reed, drove a wagon in the Oklahoma land rush.”

“Who is Antonio Weiss? He's the head of global investment banking for the financial giant Lazard.”

“With post offices and postal workers already on the ground, USPS could partner with banks to make a critical difference for millions of Americans who don't have basic banking services because there are almost no banks or bank branches in their neighborhoods.”

“With the right sources of funding and some smart, strategic thinking about how to force non-banks to follow the same rules as other lenders, the entire landscape of consumer lending would change.”

“Writing laws based on an abstract theory, rather than reality, is a dangerous undertaking.”

“You built a factory out there, good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads that the rest of us paid for. You hired workers that the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.”

“You can put handcuffs on people who push the envelope. When they break the law, they deserve to have handcuffs.”

“You can't predict it all. People will tell you to plan things out as best you can. They will tell you to focus. They will tell you to follow your dreams. They will all be right.”

“You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything in your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did.”

“You have to remember: what are incomes to banks are outgoes to families.”

“You have two pages, that's the whole credit card agreement. The terms are clear and flat and easy to see so anyone can read them. So you could lay four credit cards in front of you and say, 'Oh, that's the one that has the highest rate, that's the one that has the really scary provision that could hurt me.'”