You have to remember: what are incomes to banks are outgoes to families.

If you don't talk about families, then it's easy to disembody subprime mortgages and asset securitization and unemployment rates without remembering that every one of those numbers is a million families.

I was 30 before I realized, you know, that I probably was an accident. These things just suddenly hit you one day.

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

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

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.

I have to prove myself to everybody.

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.

I'm really concerned that too-big-to-fail has become too-big-for-trial.

If large financial institutions can break the law and accumulate million in profits - and, if they get caught, settle by paying out of those profits - they do not have much incentive to follow the law.

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

The over-representation of Wall Street banks in senior government positions sends a bad message. It tells people that one - and only one - point of view will dominate economic policymaking.

Wall Street's outsized influence in our nation's capital is something I've talked about for a long time - long before I even thought about running for office. But where I see a problem - an infestation, really - a lot of others in Washington, both Democrats and Republicans, seem to see government working just fine.

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

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.

The poor pay more, and that's one of the reasons people get trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder.

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.

The broken consumer credit market had to be repaired by making sure that consumers had the right information and could use it effectively. That meant consolidating the bloated patchwork of ineffective agencies and regulations so that a single agency could act as a voice for consumers.

We need to hold Wall Street accountable for issuing the kinds of deceptive loans that nearly brought our economy to its knees in 2008.

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.

Cops on the beat can stop problems before the damage spreads.

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

For many women, the on-time payments of domestic support obligations are essential to economic survival.

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

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

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.

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

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.

I'm not a Washington person.

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.

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.

There are very few people at the decision-making table to argue for minimum-wage workers. Very few people.

I don't want to go to Washington to be a co-sponsor of some bland little bill nobody cares about. I don't want to go to Washington to get my name on something that makes small change at the margin.

I'm not running for president.

Does anyone believe that Goldman Sachs is gonna give up a deal that would yield millions of dollars because someone fussed at them behind closed doors?

There's a lot of talk coming from Citigroup about how Dodd-Frank isn't perfect. Let me say this to anyone who is listening at Citi: I agree with you. Dodd-Frank isn't perfect. It should have broken you into pieces.

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.

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.

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.

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

It is easy when you are successful to think that you did it all by yourself and to forget that you didn't. You got here because a lot of things broke your way. You were lucky enough to be born into a family that could afford to take care of you well.

Truly successful lives are about family.

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.

Rising student-loan debt is an economic emergency.

In America today, a young person needs more education after high school just to have a chance to make it in the middle class. Not a guarantee, just a chance to make it.

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

If President Barack Obama had not been in the White House, we would not have the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau today.

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.

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.

If Federal Reserve loans are subsidies, it doesn't show up in the federal budget.