Quotes from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

I'm used to people kind of knowing me in the community.

Democrats should be getting high-fives from sanitation truck drivers - that is what should be happening in America.

Our democracy is designed to speak truth to power.

I was born in a place where your ZIP code determines your destiny.

I know what it's like to access the privilege of a ZIP Code but also be born in one that could have destined me to something else.

When people feel like they are being spoken directly to, I do feel like... they'll do things like turn out in an off-year, mid-year primary.

People try to identify who is the most likely person to turn out, and what we did is that we changed who turns out. And that changes the whole electorate.

Rather than think of it as somewhere to run from, the Bronx is somewhere to invest.

I was born to a dad who was born in the South Bronx while the Bronx was burning, while landlords were committing arson to their own buildings.

It is unacceptable to be disrespectful of Congressman Crowley. He's done some phenomenal, phenomenal work for the Bronx and Queens.

I want to speak to people directly as much as possible.

It was really my experience at Standing Rock that was pretty pivotal for me because I saw how corporations were literally militarizing themselves against American citizens so that they could kind of maximize their profit margins on fossil fuels.

We are fighting for an unapologetic movement for economic, social, and racial justice in the United States.

In Puerto Rico, we continue to see the perpetuation of second-class citizenship in the United States.

My mother cleaned homes and drove school buses, and when my family was on the brink of foreclosure... I started bartending and waitressing.

We know enough to reject the stereotype that people in the Midwest do not care about their brothers and sisters.

I was nominated at first by a group called Justice Democrats. They were trying to essentially field non-corporate candidates in the 2018 midterm election. They were looking for people with a history of community service, and my name had come across their desk, and they called.

Before ICE, we had Immigration and Naturalization Services, but it wasn't until about 1999 that we chose to criminalize immigration at all. And then, once ICE was established, we really kind of militarized that enforcement to a degree that was previously unseen in the United States.

We have to stick to the message: What are we proposing to the American people? Not, 'What are we fighting against?'

I do think that sometimes, especially coming into this going straight from activism to being a candidate or to being a person who potentially, you know, looks like will be holding political office soon, I think we expect our politicians to be perfect and fully formed and on point on every single issue.

At Standing Rock, we experienced, first-hand, people coming together in their communities and trying to use the levers of representative democracy to try and say, 'We don't want this in our community; we don't want this in our backyard,' and corporations using their monetary influence to completely erode that process.

I'm an educator. I'm an organizer.

It's really scary or it's easy to generate fear around an idea or around an -ism when you don't provide any substance to it.

There has almost never been a period of substantial economic growth in the United States without significant investment. And no investment pays off within the same cycle. No investment pays off within the same year - especially a governmental investment. Even businesses don't work that way.