Quotes from Ilhan Omar

I believe in the ideals of America, in liberty, justice, and the pursuit of happiness.

I want to go to Washington to make sure we really have an opportunity to expand health care for folks so that is accessible to them.

Fighting gerrymandering is one thing. The other thing is insuring we have the right candidates for the people and not the right candidates for the Party.

I grew up under a dictatorship. I knew what it meant for people to not have the ability to freely express themselves.

Hope will be found by understanding that diversity is the essence of the American Dream and why we need each other to fulfill it.

I talk a lot about the men in my family because my mother died when I was little, and my grandmother died when my aunts were little, so we didn't have those kinds of heads of household. But all the members of our household who were female were sort of living as equal and as wise as the male figures in our family.

I had a lot of challenges starting school, and my dad says I would come home every day crying and feeling bad about the problems I was having with some of the kids. And he would tell me to work hard on learning the language.

I think a big part of my faith teachings is to work together towards equality: that we're all created equal, and under the eyes of God, we all have a right to freedom and to access our rights equally.

I think it is really important when we're talking about fiscal responsibility that we are balancing the budget in ways that really benefit the working people and Americans.

I grew up in a household where we all celebrated who we were. There was no space to make people feel different or 'less than.'

I know how it feels to be hated because of my religious beliefs.

I am much more interested in defending my ideas than defending my identities.

If we are not actively fighting against regressive ideologies, we are contributing to making them grow.

We say this is a land of immigrants, and we forget that this was a land that belonged to people. And those of us who are new immigrants and those of us who come from generations of immigrants have to realize we are not that much different from one another.

I want my children to attend inclusive schools where diversity is respected and acknowledged as a sign of strength.

ICE has only become increasingly militarized, brutal, and unaccountable.

Minnesota's diversity should be its greatest strength, but our neglect of nonwhite students has stifled our progress toward growth and equity.

When I first arrived in the country, I really didn't speak much of the language. I knew two words coming here, and they were 'Hello' and 'Shut up.'

I know that when we interact with those we fear and hate, we will find commonality.

I look forward to being a voice of reason in fighting for transparent and accountable budgets.

We can all agree that we need to be helping small businesses. All of us can agree that the cost of higher education is too high, and college debt is too big of a burden for young people.

I am not a Somali representative. I am not a Muslim representative. I am not a millennial representative. I am not a woman representative. I am a representative who happens to have all of these marginalized identities and can understand the intersectionality of all of them in a very unique way.

What I always emphasize is that I am a representative who happens to be Somali.

The house I was born in in Somalia was right next to a big market. A lot of beggars or panhandlers would be in front of our house constantly, and my grandfather and grandmother would always invite them in to have food with us and have them take whatever was left over.