Quotes from Kamala Harris

You have to see and smell and feel the circumstances of people to really understand them.

I was raised to be an independent woman, not the victim of anything.

No woman should be told she can't make her own decisions about her body. If women's reproductive rights come under attack, I will be standing up for women.

I always start my campaigns early, and I run hard. Maybe it comes from the rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco politics, where it's not even a contact sport - it's a blood sport. This is how I am as a candidate. This is how I run campaigns.

I was standing on a ladder outside the Homestead juvenile immigrant detention center outside Miami, looking over the fence, and I saw children lined up like prisoners. They had been separated from their families and put in this private detention facility. It was horrible.

If segregationists had their way, I would not be a member of the United States Senate today, I would not be a top contender to be president of the United States.

My mother came from India to go to the University of California, Berkeley.

Women should not allow themselves to be caught up in the hype that says performance, meaning the motions, is what matters.

California is not just the Golden State. We are also the Internet State.

We need to incorporate that age-old concept of redemption into the work that we do in the criminal justice system in California.

Here's the thing: every office I've run for I was the first to win. First person of color. First woman. First woman of color. Every time.

I believe in that old adage that 'as goes California, so goes the country.'

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.

The American dream belongs to all of us.

I've had the good fortune and blessing to run for the offices for which I really wanted to do the work.

The truth is that the vast majority of Americans are good, fair, and just, and they want their country to reflect those ideals.

My parents met when they were graduate students at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. They were both active in the civil-rights movement.

Anti-Semitism is real in this country.

With the advent of DNA, we know that people have been convicted and sentenced to death who later proved not to be guilty of the crime.

I grew up hearing stories about my grandmother - my mother's mother - who used to go to villages in India in her little VW bug. My grandmother would take a bullhorn and make sure women in these villages knew how to access birth control.

I strongly believe that for serious and violent criminals, we must absolutely hold them accountable for their crimes and send them to prison.

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

I'm one of the luckiest people on earth.