Quotes from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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.

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.

It's not just that I'm a woman of color running for office. It's the way that I ran. It's the way that my identity formed my methods.

Women like me aren't supposed to run for office.

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.

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

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 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.

The way the Queens Democratic party machine has worked, they operate on a politics of exclusion.

I understand the pain of working-class Americans because I have experienced the pain.

I'm not running from the left; I'm running from the bottom. I'm running in fierce advocacy for working-class New Yorkers.

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

I don't think most of Congress understands how economics works.

Capitalism has not always existed in the world and will not always exist in the world.

What the Bronx and Queens needs is Medicare for all, tuition-free public college, a federal jobs guarantee, and criminal-justice reform.

The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan. We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy, but this time green energy.

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

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

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 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.

The Republicans galvanize their base by inciting a lot of fear; they operate on a lot of mythmaking. So we have to have something compelling. We shouldn't be afraid to be bold.

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.

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

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.