Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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.

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.

Not all Democrats are the same.

We have to have a diversity of age represented in Congress, too.

I just hope that more people will ignore the fatalism of the argument that we are beyond repair. We are not beyond repair. We are never beyond repair.

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

The biggest hurdle that our communities have is cynicism - saying it's a done deal, who cares; there's no point to voting. If we can get somebody to care, it's a huge victory for the movement and the causes we're trying to advance.

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.

There's this false notion that you have to separate and choose between issues of class and issues of race. What people do when they say that you need to separate class from race is that they are really just saying that people of color should come second.

I felt like the only way to effectively run for office is if you had access to a lot of wealth, high social influence, a lot of dynastic power, and I knew that I didn't have any of those things.

Nobody ever wins the first time they run for office. Nobody's ever supposed to win their first bid for office. Nobody's ever supposed to win without taking lobbyists' money. No one's ever supposed to defeat an incumbent. No one's ever supposed to run a grassroots campaign without running any ads on television. We did all of those things.

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.

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.

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.

It's disingenuous to... pretend the sources of our money don't impact the policy we write - you just can't serve two masters.

There is no such thing as talking about class without there being implications of the racial history of the United States. You just can't do it.

I wasn't born to a wealthy or powerful family - mother from Puerto Rico, dad from the South Bronx.

Congress is too old. They don't have a stake in the game.

The only time we create any kind of substantive change is when we reach out to a disaffected electorate and inspire and motivate them to vote.

I think - I do think that we have to have a secure border. We need to make sure that people are, in fact, documented. But that doesn't mean that we threaten people's lives.

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

If you're differently-abled, if you're a person of color, if you express your identity in a way that's different from the norm, for whatever reason, there's an implicit bias where people, frankly, sometimes take you less seriously.

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

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

Campaigns are so much more expensive than people think they are. Just to keep the lights on is several thousand dollars a month.

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.

Public schools in the late '80s and early '90s were a total mess... we felt that if I was going to have a good educational option in my life, I would have to go to a public school district that actually served its children.

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

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.

Democrats are a big-tent party. You know, I'm not trying to impose an ideology on all, you know, several hundred members of Congress.

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.

I can't name a single issue with roots in race that doesn't have economic implications, and I cannot think of a single economic issue that doesn't have racial implications. The idea that we have to separate them out and choose one is a con.

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

I knew that our community needed a very clear voice. and I think we deserved representation that rejected lobbyist funds and put our voters and our community first.

What I see is that the Democratic Party takes working class communities for granted, they take people of color for granted, and they just assume that we're going to turn out no matter how bland or half-stepping these proposals are.

In terms of closing Rikers, we have to close Rikers, but we have to ensure that we're not just taking - that we're not continuing to incarcerate the same level of people. It doesn't do us much good if we close Rikers and then take that same amount of people and just distribute them to be incarcerated elsewhere.

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.

When we talk about the word 'socialism,' I think what it really means is just democratic participation in our economic dignity and our economic, social, and racial dignity. It is about direct representation and people actually having power and stake over their economic and social wellness, at the end of the day.

I'm very hands-on about social media. That's my voice.

Change takes courage.

I believe that every American should have stable, dignified housing; health care; education - that the most very basic needs to sustain modern life should be guaranteed in a moral society.

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

I don't think any person in America should die because they are too poor to live.

To me, what socialism means is to guarantee a basic level of dignity. It's asserting the value of saying that the America we want and the America that we are proud of is one in which all children can access a dignified education. It's one in which no person is too poor to have the medicines they need to live.

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

Mentors of mine were under a big pressure to minimize their femininity to make it. I'm not going to do that. That takes away my power. I'm not going to compromise who I am.

Working-class Americans want a clear champion, and there is nothing radical about moral clarity in 2018.

The idea that we're going to austerity ourselves into prosperity is so mistaken, and honestly, I feel like one of the big problems we have is that, because Democrats don't have a deep understanding of or degrees in economics, they allow Wall Street folks to roll in the door and think that they're giving them an education.

I wake up every day, and I'm a Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx. Every single day.