Christine Quinn

“At this point in my life, I'm not going to spend a lot of time focusing on dissatisfaction with who I am, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time tempering my personality. Whatever job I have next, I'm going to be somebody who wants to get things done.”

“Chick-fil-A is not welcome in New York City as long as the company's president continues to uphold and promote his discriminatory views.”

“At times, you need to be forceful to get things that are stuck unstuck.”

“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.”

“One of the things that drives me crazy as a professional woman is you'll have bought a suit, and you get home and realize you don't have a shirt to wear with it.”

“I'm going to do whatever I have to do to help a New Yorker, whether it's a girl on the street or a tenant in a housing development.”

“There's not a lot of conversation going on in my world about softening my image. I'm pretty much who I am.”

“I have a tendency toward being a micromanager.”

“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've already begun to put pilot programs in place that give CUNY grads opportunities to get good tech jobs. We should expand on that so that New Yorkers are getting those jobs, because those jobs are probably one of the biggest 21st Century pathways into the middle class.”

“People used to feel oddly empowered to tell me all the reasons I couldn't win. Because I was a woman. Because I was a lesbian. Because I was from the West Side of Manhattan.”

“I know New Yorkers are gonna vote for a candidate - me - who has the longest record of delivering for them. They want a mayor who can deliver for them. And I'm the only one - I don't care who gets in - who has that record.”

“My late mother was very clear to my sister and I that we were to be strong women; that we were to be effective; that we were to be heard.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I want to be affirmatively proud of what I have made my way through. And to do that, in the same way I had to tell my father and my family and my friends that I was gay, I need to not hide this anymore.”

“We all think people deserve second chances. None of us are perfect.”

“It would be thrilling, obviously, to be able to have a woman and an openly LGBT person as the mayor of New York City.”

“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.”

“You might as well go through life the way you want to. If what you want is to be engaged and forceful, to 'lean in,' well, do that.”