Quotes from Maya Wiley

Some will say I don't sound like past mayors or look like them or think like them, and I say yes, I don't - that is the point.

I think women are particularly open-minded, partly because we're cultivated to be and also because we're collaborative.

Look, the Black community is diverse. We have generational divides. We have class divides. We have parts of the Black community that are fairly centrist, parts that are extremely activist.

My mother used to read me from Bank Street schools, that book, you know, Bank Street school had these early reader books. And my mother would read to my brother and I and we had all those advantages that everyone says you need to be successful in school and I was successful in school.

It's absolutely true we have to pay attention to whether low-income people of any race are able to access quality, higher education.

I think every leader has to be willing to examine their own biases.

When Superstorm Sandy churned up fourteen-foot walls of water that slammed New York's coastal communities in October 2012, they also washed away any false notions we had that we care sufficiently for poor people.

When I'm in charge, you will never have to question whether anyone is listening, whether the mayor even wants the job. You will never have to ask yourself whether you matter. You will never have to wonder whether I'm in Iowa.

Considering that police have life and death power over the public they are sworn to protect and serve, we have the right to expect public accountability to ensure that we can protect ourselves, as well.

You know, 88% of New Yorkers who have died from Covid are people of color. We are not 80% of the New York City population.

Let's be clear about one thing everyone should know: Affirmative action is constitutional.

I am not a conventional candidate.

I lived in a low-income Black community, grew up with kids on welfare and with Black folks driving Cadillacs, going to private schools and everything in between. My literal biological aunties are deeply religious. I got it all.

My father was at the forefront of the economic justice movement - fighting for and with Black women who were on welfare for dignity and for enough support to feed their families, shelter their kids.

My daughter had a Howard Dean Beanie Baby and that didn't help him. T-shirts don't win elections.

New York is such an amazing place. It's a city that I've wanted to live in since I was a little girl, my brother and I both. We both live here now and we've lived here for decades. My kids were born here.

Legal arguments, particularly when they reach the highest court in the land, can be detached from daily life.

If you tap people's racial anxieties, you're not going to get them to be able to hear any of your facts.

Big telecommunications monopolies - many of whom now seek to be content providers as well - shouldn't be able to price others out of the market simply because they can't pay as much as the giants.

We are committed to keeping the Internet open and free, and we are now advocating for the federal government to make subsidies for low-income household telephone service available for broadband too, so that our residents can pay for service more easily.

I was going to college. But to be, like, a psychologist, wanting to help people but also just kind of not being my parents.

Having grown up in a Black neighborhood, gone to a segregated Black public school that was overcrowded and underfunded, watched my neighbors be displaced when rents went up and they couldn't afford to pay them - all this shaped my career.

I remember being a child eagerly looking out the Amtrak window, waiting for the New York City skyline to emerge.

My mother was this White woman from Texas, from a racist town raised to believe in the inferiority of others by her community, not necessarily by her parents, but certainly by the community around her. And she fled it.