Elizabeth Warren quotes:

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share
  • If President Barack Obama had not been in the White House, we would not have the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau today.

  • Most women file for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious medical problem, a job loss, or a family break up. It is hard to protect against those.

  • Unfair servicing practices can worsen a family's already difficult economic situation, and the injury echoes from the family to the community and ultimately throughout the economy.

  • Banks were once places to hold money and were very careful in lending to finance families as they built a future - bought homes, bought cars, took out student loans.

  • If the big banks expect to buy influence when they give money to favored think tanks, then the public has a right to know. If the big banks don't expect to buy influence and are merely making charitable contributions, then their shareholders have a right to know. Either way, there's no excuse for keeping these payments secret.

  • Marathon Day in Boston and all of Massachusetts, it's Patriot's Day, and it's a big celebration for us. It's a day when we're kind of the whole world's city there.

  • Pundits talk about 'populist rage' as a way to trivialize the anger and fear coursing through the middle class.

  • Growing up, my mother and grandparents often talked about our family's Native American heritage. As a kid, I never thought to ask them for documentation - what kid would?

  • We all understand that we are living longer, and we are more likely to spend more years as frail, elderly people who can't work. We also recognize that the wonderful advances in medicine also come with wonderful price tags. Those are things you can't budget around.

  • The 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act will reestablish a wall between commercial and investment banking, make our financial system more stable and secure, and protect American families.

  • When billionaire car dealers or manufacturers pay for ambassadorships, at least they pay with money earned by selling something of value.

  • Credit cards are like snakes: Handle 'em long enough, and one will bite you.

  • 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.

  • My mother had taught me about the importance of finding a 'good provider,' so when my boyfriend proposed, I said 'yes' in a heartbeat. I was still just a kid, and I didn't know what was coming in life.

  • There are lots of families who - who make irresponsible purchases. There are also a lot of families who have debt on credit cards because they use those credit cards to pay for medical bills.

  • G.E. doesn't pay any taxes, and we are asking college kids to take on even more debt to get an education and asking seniors to get by on less. These aren't just economic questions. These are moral questions.

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

  • With the right sources of funding and some smart, strategic thinking about how to force non-banks to follow the same rules as other lenders, the entire landscape of consumer lending would change.

  • Some economists estimate that for every family that goes bankrupt, there are about 15 more who are in the same amount of financial trouble and would profit from bankruptcy but just haven't filed.

  • I'm willing to throw my body in front of the bus to stop bad ideas.

  • Middle class' used to be synonymous with secure, with steady, with boring, because middle-class people were people who were pretty much safe from the time they first started work on through retirement and until their deaths. No longer.

  • I made it real clear to the business community - if your plan for innovation is to trick people, is to fool them, is not to tell them the truth about the price, then you're right: I'm going to be right in the way.

  • I loved teaching, but every day that I went to work, I carried the worry that I was hurting my kids because I wasn't at home with them.

  • Consumer banking - selling debt to middle class families - has been a gold mine.

  • I'm still very connected to my family, to the world I grew up in. I understand what it means to be afraid that you can't pay a doctor's bill. Or to have to make the choice between buying a band uniform for a seventh-grader and making the insurance payment on time. That will never leave me. It was how I lived until I was well into my adult years.

  • I pay for homeowner's insurance, I pay for car insurance, I pay for health insurance.

  • People with banking experience haven't all flocked to the biggest banks; community banks and regional banks, along with smaller trading houses and credit unions, have some very talented people.

  • I graduated law school nine months pregnant and didn't take a job.

  • The women who file for bankruptcy played by all the rules, but they are still in economic freefall.

  • People who graduate are more resilient financially, and they weather economic downturns better than people who don't graduate. And, throughout their lives, people who graduate are more likely to be economically secure, more likely to be healthy, and more likely to live longer. Face it: A college degree puts a lot in your corner.

  • Who is Antonio Weiss? He's the head of global investment banking for the financial giant Lazard.

  • I never sought nor gained personal benefit in school or job applications based on my heritage.

  • We've seen filibusters to block judicial nominations, jobs bills, political transparency, ending Big Oil subsidies - you name it, there's been a filibuster.

  • Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea, God Bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and paid forward for the next kid who comes along.

  • 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.

  • Thomas Piketty assembles the facts to prove a central point about trickle-down economics: Doesn't work. Never did. He has cold, hard data showing how the rich keep getting richer and how the playing field is rigged against working families.

  • Consumers get used to reading and understanding their credit card contracts, their mortgages, their check overdraft agreements, those are good things. That puts power back in the hands of consumers.

  • If the notion on this is we're going to elect somebody to the United States Senate so they can be the 100th least senior person in there and be polite, and somewhere in their fourth or fifth year do some bipartisan bill that nobody cares about, don't vote for me.

  • Rising student-loan debt is an economic emergency.

  • Raising the minimum wage means we have workers paying more in to support the Social Security system.

  • The core of my career is my teaching and my writing.

  • Never be so faithful to your plan that you are unwilling to consider the unexpected. Never be so faithful to your plan that you are unwilling to entertain the improbable opportunity that comes looking for you.

  • 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.

  • Writing laws based on an abstract theory, rather than reality, is a dangerous undertaking.

  • No matter how good a deal sounds, if your name goes on the bottom line, you need to understand it and be sure you'll be able to pay. You are responsible for yourself forever. Forever.

  • It worries me about what happens if people in government are looking for that next job: 'Yeah I'm working now, not as much money as I could be making, but when I leave here, that's where I'm headed.' That ultimately infects whatever it is that they're doing.

  • Bankruptcy exposes the economic vulnerability and insecurity of middle class women.

  • Citigroup has a lot of money, it spends a lot of money, and it uses that money to grow and consolidate power. And it pays off.

  • In the 1960s, a minimum wage job would keep a family of three afloat.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I have voted against only one of President Obama's nominees: Michael Froman, a Citigroup alumnus who is currently storming the halls of Congress as U.S. Trade Representative pushing trade deals that threaten to undermine financial regulation, workers' rights, and environmental protections.

  • I know what I am in Washington to do: I'm here to fight for hardworking families.

  • It doesn't make me happy to go back and talk about how great high school was.

  • 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.

  • I learned early on what debt means, how vulnerable it makes people, what the security of owning a home means.

  • Republicans say they don't believe in government. Sure they do. They believe in government to help themselves and their powerful friends.

  • Markets work when people can evaluate the prices and risks of different products, then pick the ones that work best for them. But when the terms of the deal are hidden, competition doesn't work. And customers aren't the only ones who are hurt.

  • We should stop having a conversation about cutting Social Security a little bit or a lot.

  • President Obama believes in a level playing field.

  • 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.

  • You can put handcuffs on people who push the envelope. When they break the law, they deserve to have handcuffs.

  • America's middle class is getting hammered, and Washington is rigged to work for the big guy.

  • I think a lot of Americans are not sure which side Washington is on: the side of banks or the side of the people.

  • The Postal Service is huge - employing more than a half million people - and its history is long and complicated.

  • My brothers and I grew up on stories about our grandfather building one-room schoolhouses and about our grandparents' courtship and their early lives together in Indian Territory.

  • Other countries around the world make employees and retirees first in the priority. For example, in Mexico, the bankruptcy laws say if a company wants to go bankrupt... obligations to employees and retirees will have a first priority. That has an effect on every negotiation that takes place with every company in Mexico.

  • Too often, people get jobs based on who they know - not what they know.

  • A good education is a foundation for a better future.

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

  • 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.

  • Big corporations have money and power to make sure every rule breaks their way; people have voices and votes to push back.

  • I'm not running for president.

  • Some of these biggest financial institutions are out there trading in commodities. They're buying oil tankers. This is not a financial system that has calmed down and is there to serve the American people.

  • What we collectively decide about how to bail out our economy, how to pull our economy out of a ditch and what rules we put in place to make sure this problem does not happen again, will shape our country for the next 50 years. This is it.

  • Wall Street banks have the right to express their views to lawmakers and regulators through lobbying, but the law is clear: If they want to influence lawmakers, they must disclose their lobbying expenditures.

  • I will work my heart out to earn the trust of the people of Massachusetts.

  • 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."

  • The President's policy proposal, known as 'chained CPI,' would re-calculate the cost of living for Social Security beneficiaries. That new number won't keep up with inflation on things like food and health care -- the basics that we need to live. In short, 'chained CPI' is just a fancy way to say 'cut benefits for seniors, the permanently disabled, and orphans.'

  • Look around. Oil companies guzzle down the billions in profits. Billionaires pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries, and Wall Street CEOs, the same ones the direct our economy and destroyed millions of jobs still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them. Does anyone here have a problem with that?

  • I want to be blunt: We should not be fighting about equal pay for equal work, and access to birth control, in 2012. These issues were resolved years ago - until the Republicans brought them back.

  • Student loan debt is crushing young people. And so they're not doing the things we would expect them to do. They're not moving out of their parents' homes in as big a numbers, they're not saving up money for down payments, they're not buying homes or cars or starting small businesses or doing any of the things that help move this economy forward.

  • I talk to nurses and programmers, salespeople and firefighters - people who bust their tails every day. Not one of them - not one - stashes their money in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

  • We're Americans. We celebrate success. We just don't want the game to be rigged.

  • The banks lobbied Washington so they could write the rules that got us into this crisis. They then lobbied Washington to get the money to bail them out. And then they are lobbying Washington to write the rules so they can get us into the next crisis. It's perfect circularity.

  • College students today are drowning in debt, and it is hurting them and hurting our economy. We must find a way to help families pay for college without condemning them to a lifetime of indebtedness.

  • It is not the job of the Department of Education to maximize profits for the government at the cost of squeezing students who are struggling to get an education.

  • Me, I was waiting tables of 13 and married at 19. I graduated from public schools, and taught elementary school.

  • I don't want to overstate the gender difference. But women are more sensitized to the way that larger issues affect their pocketbooks, like pay equality or cost of living changes.

  • Adjusted for inflation, somebody going to college today to a state university, is paying about 300 percent of what her mom or dad did just 30 years ago.

  • Mitt Romney is the guy who said corporations are people. No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people.

  • No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love, and they die. And that matters. That matters because we don't run this country for corporations, we run it for people.

  • I have a daughter and I have granddaughters and I will never vote to let a group of backward-looking ideologues cut women's access to birth control. We have lived in that world, and we are not going back, not ever

  • Why is the Keystone Pipeline the very first, #1 item on the Republicans' agenda? We know that this pipeline runs terrible environmental risks and it just won't do much for the American people. So why is this bill so urgent? Money and power.

  • If there's any lesson I've learned in the last five years, it's don't be so sure about what lies ahead. There are amazing doors that could open,

  • Are you ready to fight for good jobs and and a solid level playing field? Are you ready to prove to another generation of Americans that we can build a better country and a newer world? Joe Biden is ready. Barack Obama is ready. I am ready. You're ready.

  • Americans are fighters. We're tough, resourceful and creative, and if we have the chance to fight on a level playing field, where everyone pays a fair share and everyone has a real shot, then no one - no one can stop us.

  • The trickle-down experiment that began in the Reagan years failed America's middle class. Sure, the rich are doing great. Giant corporations are doing great. Lobbyists are doing great. But we need an economy where everyone else who works hard gets a shot at doing great!

  • If you don't have a seat at the table, you're probably on the menu.

  • The people on Wall Street broke this country, and they did it one lousy mortgage at a time. It happened more than three years ago, and there has been no real accountability, and there has been no real effort to fix it.

  • Our veterans deserve the very best, and that means ensuring that America's veterans receive high-quality services and cares when they come back home.

  • The financial services industry has seemed to treat the crisis like a little rainfall - inconvenient, but no significant changes needed. The real question moving forward is how the industry will respond to Wall Street reform and growing public anger.

  • Congress must go further to protect the right to privacy, to end the NSA's dragnet surveillance of ordinary Americans, to make the intelligence community more transparent and accountable.

  • When people feel like, 'Lenders weren't fair with me; I don't have any responsibility to be fair with them.' If we go far enough down that line, much of the fabric of our economy starts to unravel.

  • Others have said it before me. If you don't have a seat at the table, you're probably on the menu. And so it is important that we have women in the United States Senate - strong women, women who are there to help advance an agenda that is important to women.

  • Regulators all meet with Goldman Sachs executives and employees day after day after day. They don't see the people who get tricked, the people who get cheated, the people who get fooled by the products that Goldman turns out.

  • For capitalism to work, we all need one another.

  • If nobody can sell mortgage-backed securities based on trillions of dollars of unpayable instruments, there's a lot less risk in the overall system.

  • I learned something important in my race against Senator Brown: voters want political leaders who are willing to break the partisan gridlock. They want fewer closed-door roadblocks and more public votes on legislation that could improve their lives.

  • People feel like the system is rigged against them, and here is the painful part, they're right. The system is rigged.

  • Even families with health insurance are quite vulnerable to a severe economic reversal if someone gets sick.

  • I had to make a choice - recede into the academic world, or wade into politics.

  • Paul Ryan looks around, sees three unemployed workers for every job opening in America, and blames the people who can't find a job.

  • If Scott Walker sees 100,000 teachers & firefighters as his enemies, maybe it's time we take a closer look at his friends.

  • Cars, toys, aspirin, meat, toasters, water - nearly every product sold has passed basic safety regulations well in advance of being marketed and sold. But consumer credit is a kind of buyer-beware, wild west. That is partly the result of history.

  • Groupthink can become a serious issue - old ideas stay around after they're useful, and new ideas too often don't get a fair hearing.

  • We need to align the incentives so that colleges have an incentive to keep down their costs... to graduate students on time with degrees in areas where they're going to be able to get jobs and going to be able to pay back those loans.

  • When I first started talking about running for office, a lot of people said to me, 'Don't let the consultants change you,' and I'd always assured them that I wouldn't allow it to happen. But like it or not, I had to change. Not because of a consultant, but because I started to understand the cost of a stupid mistake.

  • The word's out: I'm a woman, and I'm going to have trouble backing off on that. I am what I am. I'll go out and talk to people about what's happening to their families, and when I do that, I'm a mother. I'm a grandmother.

  • Bankruptcy is about financial death and financial rebirth. Bankruptcy is the great American story rewritten. We're a nation of debtors.

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share