“Doing nothing while the middle class is hurting. That's not leadership. Loose regulations and lax enforcement. That's not leadership. That's abandoning our middle class.”

“Generally speaking, the public appetite for criminal justice policy is just tough talk.”

“I always start my campaigns early, and I run hard. Maybe it comes from the rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco politics, where it's not even a contact sport - it's a blood sport. This is how I am as a candidate. This is how I run campaigns.”

“I believe in that old adage that 'as goes California, so goes the country.'”

“I believe that a child going without an education is a crime.”

“I believe you've got to do your due diligence.”

“I convened the first-ever national training conference for prosecutors on how to promote and deal with hate crime issues in terms of prosecutions and also protocol for defeating the gay panic defense.”

“I have a difficult time sitting down for long periods.”

“I think Hillary Clinton could do whatever she puts her mind to. I really do. She's incredibly dedicated to public service, she is smart as a whip, and she's effective.”

“I want to use my position of leadership to help move along at a faster pace what I believe and know the Obama administration wants to do around the urgency of climate change.”

“I was raised to be an independent woman, not the victim of anything.”

“I'm a career prosecutor. I have been trained, and my experience over decades, is to make decisions after a review of the evidence and the facts. And not to jump up with grand gestures before I've done that. Some might interpret that as being cautious. I would tell you that's just responsible.”

“My mother had a saying: 'Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you're not the last.'”

“Running for office is similar to being a trial lawyer in a very long trial. It requires adrenaline and stamina; it requires being in shape mentally and emotionally. It's a marathon.”

“So many people trip in front of them because they're looking over there or up ahead.”

“The American dream belongs to all of us.”

“The bells will ring and the marriages will begin. And it's a great day in our state for equal protection under the law for all people.”

“These days, children can text on their cell phone all night long, and no one else is seeing that phone. You don't know who is calling that child.”

“To be smart on crime, we should not be in a position of constantly reacting to crime after it happens. We should be looking at preventing crime before it happens.”

“To change criminal justice policy in any meaningful way means to propose changing a very longstanding system. It's not realistic to think you can do it overnight.”

“We don't want to promote any system that treats the fact that an individual is LGBT as a personality disorder. And anything that perpetuates that perception is harmful - not only to that member of the community but the entire community.”

“We need to incorporate that age-old concept of redemption into the work that we do in the criminal justice system in California.”

“What we all want is public safety. We don't want rhetoric that's framed through ideology.”

“What we know is smartphones are everywhere and they are rich in data. What we know is that there are apps once downloaded by the consumer that will also in turn download the consumers' contact book. Most consumers don't want that to happen and don't know it's happening.”

“With the advent of DNA, we know that people have been convicted and sentenced to death who later proved not to be guilty of the crime.”

“You have to see and smell and feel the circumstances of people to really understand them.”