People feel like the system is rigged against them, and here is the painful part, they're right. The system is rigged.
You can't predict it all. People will tell you to plan things out as best you can. They will tell you to focus. They will tell you to follow your dreams. They will all be right.
It doesn't make me happy to go back and talk about how great high school was.
A pension is nothing more than deferred compensation.
Bankruptcy is about financial death and financial rebirth. Bankruptcy is the great American story rewritten. We're a nation of debtors.
I grew up in the Methodist church and taught Sunday school, and one of my favorite passages of scripture is, 'in as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.' Matthew 25:40.
'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.
We can't go out and tell ourselves we've done good if we haven't.
I think I grew up with a profound sense of watching people who were good people, who were smart people, who were hardworking people - God, nobody on this Earth worked harder than my mom and dad - and they had very little.
I had to make a choice - recede into the academic world, or wade into politics.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not going to talk about who I voted for.
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.
In the 1960s, a minimum wage job would keep a family of three afloat.
It is critical that the American people, and not just their financial institutions, be represented at the negotiating table.
You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything in your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did.
Credit card agreements run as long as 30 pages, and it's 30 pages of largely incomprehensible text.
You have two pages, that's the whole credit card agreement. The terms are clear and flat and easy to see so anyone can read them. So you could lay four credit cards in front of you and say, 'Oh, that's the one that has the highest rate, that's the one that has the really scary provision that could hurt me.'
