Quotes from Elizabeth Warren

We see men and women who work as hard as they possibly can and still fall behind a little more every month. We see lives that look nothing like those lived by billionaires in eighteen-thousand-square-foot condos, because these people don't live in some fairy tale—they live in today's reality. *

Think tanks support so-called experts who will offer an opinion on anything—if the price is right. The result is that the rich and powerful flourish, while everyone else is left further and further behind. The cumulative impact of decades of these decisions has been to hollow out America's middle class and to leave us, as a nation, weakened. The game is rigged. It is deliberately, persistently, and aggressively rigged to help the rich and powerful get richer and more powerful.

Of course, not every kid has the same risk of becoming a victim. A large number of those gun deaths occur in poor neighborhoods.

When you have no real power, go public—really public. The public is where the real power is.

Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage today is lower than it was in 1965—about 24 percent lower. That job at Sears allowed my mother to eke out a

Nobody who works full time deserves to live in poverty.

America could do a lot with the money taxpayers spend to keep afloat people who are working full-time but whose employers don't pay a living wage. Of

When you fight back and win, even in small battles, it makes a difference in who you become. You're better for it. That's what persistence is about. It's a ferocious optimism.

The Republicans were locked in: they would block any efforts to increase the minimum wage by even a few nickels. The

I also understood that for more than forty years, workers' pay hadn't kept pace with inflation. Productivity had gone up. Profits had gone up. Executives had gotten raises. Couldn't we at last come together to make sure that the people who did some of the hardest, dirtiest work in the nation got at least a chance to build a little security? And

If you don't fight, you can't win.

If ever there was a time to fight, this was it.

a little here, bends a little there. And far too often

we also need to understand how and why our country has gone so thoroughly wrong. We need a plan to put us back on track—and then we need to get to work and make it happen. We need to live our values, to be the kind of nation that invests in opportunity, not just for some of us, but for all of us. We need to take our democracy back from those who would pervert it for their own benefit. We need to build the America of our best dreams.

this man was even more divisive and dishonest than his presidential campaign revealed.

You can't fix a problem you can't see. Simply saying that the laws (or the economy, or the rules that govern policing, or anything else) are racially blind doesn't mean that reality is racially blind. To attack problems head-on--to be anti-racist--begins with asking questions about race.

It's frequently pointed out that plenty of good people work in criminal justice. That's true, but it's also beside the point. Racist policing isn't a problem caused by one bad apple or even a dozen bad apples. It's a structural problem. Its a problem that begins with persistent racism in our country, which in turn feeds the way we approach criminal justice. It's a broken system, and eliminating a few bad apples won't fix it.

Claims such as I'm not a racist or so-and-so is not a racist may sound harmless to some, but to many they cut deep. Familiar denials like these so often seem to be the justification for a second, unspoken part to that sentence: and therefore I don't have to do anything about racism. And that's the part that is just plain wrong.

You cannot spend your way out of pain. But you can make every pain worse by trying to treat it with money.

If all this seems too tough, then the solution is simple: don't run for office. The American people should never have to worry about whether the decisions made by public officials are driven by public interest or by their own personal finance interest.

I'll get the popcorn." I yelled up the stairs to let Bruce know I was coming. I also had the beer and my laptop.

forty million people are trying to figure out how to pay off a combined $1.4 trillion in student loan debt.

We need to live our values, to be the kind of nation that invests in opportunity, not just for some of us, but for all of us.

Meanwhile, bank regulators looked off somewhere in the middle distance, wearing the same expression as a dog owner who's pretending that his pooch isn't pooping on your lawn.