As a young prosecutor right out of law school at the Alameda County DA's office that Earl Warren once led, I started my work.

You got to take care of yourself. If I exercise or I eat proper foods, am I indulging myself? That's called feeding your body.

My mother cooked like a scientist. She had a giant Chinese-style cleaver that she chopped with, and a cupboard full of spices.

The truth is that the vast majority of Americans are good, fair, and just, and they want their country to reflect those ideals.

We need to incorporate that age-old concept of redemption into the work that we do in the criminal justice system in California.

My parents met when they were graduate students at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. They were both active in the civil-rights movement.

Part of my focus on what we need to do around smart gun safety laws is recognize we have to have more enforcement around gun dealers.

With the advent of DNA, we know that people have been convicted and sentenced to death who later proved not to be guilty of the crime.

The bells will ring and the marriages will begin. And it's a great day in our state for equal protection under the law for all people.

We're talking about in the Proposition 8 case fundamental rights, civil rights. I offer no apology for the position I took in Prop. 8.

I understood that with the swipe of my pen as a prosecutor, I would have the decision in my pen to make a decision about someone's life.

Here's the thing: every office I've run for I was the first to win. First person of color. First woman. First woman of color. Every time.

I strongly believe that for serious and violent criminals, we must absolutely hold them accountable for their crimes and send them to prison.

I'm prepared to say that law enforcement should be allowed to seize the guns of those who are suspected to be involved in domestic terrorism.

If you want to deal with an epidemic - crime or health - the smartest and most effective and cheapest way to deal with it is prevention first.

These days, children can text on their cell phone all night long, and no one else is seeing that phone. You don't know who is calling that child.

I'm opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education, or public health, period.

It was an act of patriotism when we worked to pass a law allowing the prosecution of federal hate crimes in the name of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd.

Lena Waithe won an Emmy for writing while starring on the Netflix show 'Master of None,' but it might be more accurate to call her a Master of Everything.

If segregationists had their way, I would not be a member of the United States Senate today, I would not be a top contender to be president of the United States.

To change criminal justice policy in any meaningful way means to propose changing a very longstanding system. It's not realistic to think you can do it overnight.

To be smart on crime, we should not be in a position of constantly reacting to crime after it happens. We should be looking at preventing crime before it happens.

We've got to keep our eye on what's happening with Russia and North Korea. We cannot lose sight of domestic policy, either. Healthcare. Immigration. Climate change.

There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.

I think Hillary Clinton could do whatever she puts her mind to. I really do. She's incredibly dedicated to public service, she is smart as a whip, and she's effective.

What's important for my daughter to know is that... if you are fortunate to have opportunity, it is your duty to make sure other people have those opportunities as well.

Doing nothing while the middle class is hurting. That's not leadership. Loose regulations and lax enforcement. That's not leadership. That's abandoning our middle class.

People who work for me know that family comes first. And I'm fortunate to have a family that is very supportive of the work I do, so I don't have to live two separate lives.

I want to use my position of leadership to help move along at a faster pace what I believe and know the Obama administration wants to do around the urgency of climate change.

And so I would not enforce a law that would reject people and turn them away without giving them a fair and due process to determine if we should give them asylum and refuge.

Running for office is similar to being a trial lawyer in a very long trial. It requires adrenaline and stamina; it requires being in shape mentally and emotionally. It's a marathon.

I could do all of my activities at Howard because it was an environment that had essentially rid the ideology of false choices that I feel absolutely constricts young black students.

Let's be clear about this, and let's be clear: we should not be creating incentives to house people in prison. We should be creating incentives instead to shut the revolving door into prison.

Don't pretend that you can just be oblivious to politics. You can't. What you never do is break your personal code. Have a code and keep it. You should never compromise what your priorities are.

Who of us has not had that situation where you've got to wait for approval, and the doctor says, 'Well, I don't know if your insurance company is going to cover this?' Let's eliminate all of that.

I disagree with any policy that would turn America's back on people who are fleeing harm. I frankly believe that it is contrary to everything that we have symbolically and actually said we stand for.

Let's not build the policy around the abuse. That's not good policy. That's actually bad policy. Build the policy around the aspiration point. That's what we need to do when we're seeing abuse online.

I convened the first-ever national training conference for prosecutors on how to promote and deal with hate crime issues in terms of prosecutions and also protocol for defeating the gay panic defense.

As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I know that the men and women of our intelligence community put their lives on the line every day, and they do very dangerous work to keep our country safe.

Listen, I think that people want a president who is going to be interested in the things that keep them up at night, the things that are weighing on them, the things that are debilitating and can be addressed.

Eighty-two percent of prisoners in the United States are high-school dropouts. A high-school dropout between the ages of 30 and 34 is two-thirds more likely to be in jail, or to have been in jail, or to be dead.

We don't have to guess what Mitt Romney would have done if he were president. Because he told us. He said we should let foreclosures - and I quote - 'hit the bottom' so the market could - I quote - 'run its course.'

Every day there are homeowners in California who will either receive relief so they can stay in their home, or will be in the foreclosure process and potentially lose their home. And that always weighed heavily on my mind.

I did not learn the flaws of the criminal-justice system in law school or college or by reading about it. I grew up knowing the flaws and how it was disproportionately impacting the black community. It's not academic for me.

Well, yeah, people are working in our country. You know what? They're working two and three jobs, and in our America, people should not have to work more than one job to be able to put food on the table and have a roof over their head.

I grew up hearing stories about my grandmother - my mother's mother - who used to go to villages in India in her little VW bug. My grandmother would take a bullhorn and make sure women in these villages knew how to access birth control.

In California, we have some of the strongest consumer protection laws in the country. While it is easy to conceive of innovation and regulation as mutually exclusive, California is proof that we can do both. We can innovate responsibly.

We don't want to promote any system that treats the fact that an individual is LGBT as a personality disorder. And anything that perpetuates that perception is harmful - not only to that member of the community but the entire community.

I always start my campaigns early, and I run hard. Maybe it comes from the rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco politics, where it's not even a contact sport - it's a blood sport. This is how I am as a candidate. This is how I run campaigns.

In every work environment, there will be politics. If you really want to rise to the top, you need to figure out what those politics in your workplace are. Then, you hook it in. You decide what conforms and what does not conform to your personal code.

Share This Page