Quotes from Kamala Harris

Let's be clear about this, and let's be clear: we should not be creating incentives to house people in prison. We should be creating incentives instead to shut the revolving door into prison.

Well, yeah, people are working in our country. You know what? They're working two and three jobs, and in our America, people should not have to work more than one job to be able to put food on the table and have a roof over their head.

I'm a career prosecutor. I have been trained, and my experience over decades, is to make decisions after a review of the evidence and the facts. And not to jump up with grand gestures before I've done that. Some might interpret that as being cautious. I would tell you that's just responsible.

I convened the first-ever national training conference for prosecutors on how to promote and deal with hate crime issues in terms of prosecutions and also protocol for defeating the gay panic defense.

I believe that a child going without an education is a crime.

I want to use my position of leadership to help move along at a faster pace what I believe and know the Obama administration wants to do around the urgency of climate change.

Doing nothing while the middle class is hurting. That's not leadership. Loose regulations and lax enforcement. That's not leadership. That's abandoning our middle class.

What we all want is public safety. We don't want rhetoric that's framed through ideology.

To change criminal justice policy in any meaningful way means to propose changing a very longstanding system. It's not realistic to think you can do it overnight.

As a young prosecutor right out of law school at the Alameda County DA's office that Earl Warren once led, I started my work.

We don't want to promote any system that treats the fact that an individual is LGBT as a personality disorder. And anything that perpetuates that perception is harmful - not only to that member of the community but the entire community.

Running for office is similar to being a trial lawyer in a very long trial. It requires adrenaline and stamina; it requires being in shape mentally and emotionally. It's a marathon.

'Getting smart on crime' does not mean reducing sentences or punishments for crimes.

To be smart on crime, we should not be in a position of constantly reacting to crime after it happens. We should be looking at preventing crime before it happens.

Part of my focus on what we need to do around smart gun safety laws is recognize we have to have more enforcement around gun dealers.

If you want to deal with an epidemic - crime or health - the smartest and most effective and cheapest way to deal with it is prevention first.

So many people trip in front of them because they're looking over there or up ahead.

As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I know that the men and women of our intelligence community put their lives on the line every day, and they do very dangerous work to keep our country safe.

What we know is smartphones are everywhere and they are rich in data. What we know is that there are apps once downloaded by the consumer that will also in turn download the consumers' contact book. Most consumers don't want that to happen and don't know it's happening.

And so I would not enforce a law that would reject people and turn them away without giving them a fair and due process to determine if we should give them asylum and refuge.

Everybody will make mistakes, and for some that mistake will rise to the level of being a crime.

Mitt Romney subscribes to the cynical logic that says the American dream belongs to some of us but not all of us.

I've had the honor of speaking at many commencements.

My mother cooked like a scientist. She had a giant Chinese-style cleaver that she chopped with, and a cupboard full of spices.