The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.
If you don't like me, life goes on, you know what I mean? But I hope you do like me. Because I think that in addition to being pushy, I'm nice.
I couldn't be more proud of my work as a progressive.
Consensus doesn't happen by magic... You have to drive to it.
I'm tough, I'm pushy, I'm really loud. I used to spend a lot of time thinking about it. But we only have so much brain capacity, so if I'm spending part of my brain thinking about how I'm acting, A, I'm not spending all of my brain doing, and B, I'm not actually in that moment.
When I end up yelling, it's not really deliberate. It's usually out of some moment of passion or frustration or real desire to get unstuck.
When I was running for speaker, people would go out of their way to point out why I wasn't going to win: 'You're a woman, you're too liberal, you're gay, you're from the West Side of Manhattan,' which in that context was an insult.
I really believe, when you come out of hiding, in whatever way you're hiding, you get to go out into the sunlight.
Being an activist is about getting things done. It's not about standing around shaking your fist in anger.
At the end of the day, somebody someday is going to say something about you. At least you can look back and say you lived the way you wanted to.
Don't keep your own schedule - that will eat too much of your time keeping your own schedule. And when you are tired, stop. Because if you are too tired, you become not productive, and you are wasting time.
For better or worse, when you're running for mayor, there's a little bit of a spotlight on you.
At times, you need to be forceful to get things that are stuck unstuck.
I'm a lesbian. Yup. Hundred percent. Hundred percent. I remember being in college, and I had fallen in love with this woman, and I remember sitting in my dorm room saying out loud to myself, like, 'You have enough problems. You are not gonna let this happen.' You just kinda, like, stuff it away until - well, some people stuff it away forever.
I'm an aggressive woman who gets things done, and that's the way it is, and I've never been embarrassed about the fact that I am pushy.
I'm tough, and you know what? New Yorkers deserve that. They work head, they fight it out, they slug it out. And they deserve a mayor or a speaker who's going to do the same.
I think it's really important to realize that small businesses are often the portal for immigrants into the New York City economy. I think we have something like 40,000 small businesses that are immigrant-run in New York.
People have said I can come off a little trial-lawyerish. I tell people I never actually became a lawyer, but I play one at City Hall.
My favorite app is 'StumbleUpon,' because it just gives you interesting things that are sometimes exactly the stuff I'm interested in and sometimes just silly and funny.
I have a tendency toward being a micromanager.
