Quotes from Elizabeth Warren

I saw at a young age that one bad break can turn a family's financial life upside down. And it has affected everything in my life since then.

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.'

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The total amount of money that Wall Street handed out in bonuses last year was double the total income of ALL full-time minimum wage workers. That's obscene.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

We lose eight children and teenagers to gun violence every day. If a mysterious virus suddenly started killing eight of our children every day, America would mobilize teams of doctors and public health officials. We would move heaven and earth until we found a way to protect our children. But not with gun violence.

Today the game is rigged—rigged to work for those who have money and power. Big corporations hire armies of lobbyists to get billion-dollar loopholes into the tax system and persuade their friends in Congress to support laws that keep the playing field tilted in their favor. Meanwhile, hardworking families are told that they'll just have to live with smaller dreams for their children.

Everybody in this room knows the basic rule: if you don't have a seat at the table, you are probably on the menu.

For capitalism to work, we all need one another.

The bankers might not have said it in so many words, but gradually their strategy emerged: Target families who were already in a little trouble, lend them more money, get them entangled in high fees and astronomical interest rates, and then block the doors to the bankruptcy exit if they really got in over their heads.

The single best predictor that a family would go bankrupt was if they had a child.

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you. "But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers that the rest of us paid to educate...Part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Getting straight with your money is as complicated as a trip to the grocery store: You need a comparison shop, add and subtract, stick with a plan, and ask questions- nothing more.

I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don't listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People—powerful people—listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don't criticize other insiders. I

By late 2008, one out of every five mortgage holders owed more than their homes were worth. The banks called in the loans, and the foreclosure notices piled up.