A biography for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezhasn’t been written yet.
“I'm very hands-on about social media. That's my voice.”
“My mother cleaned homes and drove school buses, and when my family was on the brink of foreclosure... I started bartending and waitressing.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We have to have a diversity of age represented in Congress, too.”
“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.”
“We are fighting for an unapologetic movement for economic, social, and racial justice in the United States.”
“For me, democratic socialism is about - really, the value for me is that I believe that in a modern, moral, and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“I don't think any person in America should die because they are too poor to live.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I'm used to people kind of knowing me in the community.”
“The way the Queens Democratic party machine has worked, they operate on a politics of exclusion.”
“We have to stick to the message: What are we proposing to the American people? Not, 'What are we fighting against?'”