Food Stamp recipients didn’t cause the financial crisis; recklessness on Wall Street did.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, I did not take the oath I have just taken with the intention of presiding over the dissolution of the world’s strongest economy.

If you’re worried about the deficit, pay attention to the fact that it’s almost all attributable to military spending and the totally dysfunctional health program.

It’s important that we invest in America – literally. The terrorists wanted to destroy our economy, and we can’t let our system fall apart. We also have to invest in one another.

Even if the economy crashes, we will still burn oil.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

Capitalism is using its money; we socialists throw it away.

You know, my Grandpop Finnegan used to have an expression: he used to say, ‚Joey, the guy in Olyphant’s out of work, it’s an economic slowdown. When your brother-in-law’s out of work, it’s a recession. When you’re out of work, it’s a depression.‘

If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for years to come.

Let me remind you that credit is the lifeblood of business, the lifeblood of prices and jobs.

Yes, we’ve still got more work to do. More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who has not yet felt the progress of these past seven and a half years.

India’s trade deficit is because of excess of import over exports.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.

The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.

In December, I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans. But we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. We can’t afford it. And I refuse to renew them again.

Over the objections, where they sound like squealing pigs, over the objections of Romney and all his allies, we passed some of the toughest Wall Street regulations in history, turning Wall Street back into the allocator of capital it always has been and no longer a casino. And they want to repeal it.

If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened.

Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.

Politics is just a function of business now, just a tributary of the great entrepreneurial capitalist system.

No one saw the recession coming.

Women are the engine driving the growth in California’s economy. Women make California’s economy unique.

No nation was ever ruined by trade.

The problem is that the U.S. government is the biggest debtor in the world, and those depending on it to take care of them will only become poorer.

I bet taxpayers remember providing more than $812 billion to Citigroup and Bank of America, two Wall Street banks, in 2009 to bail them out during the 2008 financial crisis. Taxpayers remember that generosity; big banks evidently don’t.

Putin sought to destabilize Ukraine’s economy.

Nobody wants to put the creditworthiness of the United States in jeopardy. Nobody wants to see the United States default. So we’ve got to seize this moment, and we have to seize it soon.

A financial crisis is a great time for professional investors and a horrible time for average ones.

Wall Street apparently takes and then forgets, and then comes after the guns of law-abiding American citizens and small businesses.

England is a nation of shopkeepers.

The dollar has lost over 90 percent of its value since the Fed was created.

See, that’s why Barack’s running: to end the war in Iraq responsibly – to build an economy that lifts every family, to make sure health care is available for every American – and to make sure that every child in this nation has a world-class education all the way from preschool to college.

I love big business!

Every Republican’s voted for it. Look at what they value and look at their budget and what they’re proposing. Romney wants to let the – he said in the first 100 days he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules – unchain Wall Street. They’re gonna put y’all back in chains.

Even people on the liberal side are starting to worry about going off a fiscal cliff.

Agriculture not only gives riches to a nation, but the only riches she can call her own.

It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.

We can choose a future where we export more products and outsource fewer jobs. After a decade that was defined by what we bought and borrowed, we’re getting back to basics, and doing what America has always done best: We’re making things again.

If you believe that tax policy has nothing to do with the economy, then you’re pretty much like a rock, only dumber.

Building new roads and bridges creates jobs. Growing our exports creates jobs. Reforming our outdated tax system and our broken immigration system creates jobs.

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.

Fuel prices are at the center of our lives. They affect our ability to travel, stay warm, and feed ourselves.

The minute a Wall Street firm purchases your debt, your bank no longer has it on its financial statement, which then allows the bank to look for more credit card customers. That’s one reason why you get so many credit card offers.

It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.

The economy’s always been the engine for our national security.

When America stopped importing from China, China stopped importing from the rest of the world. This affects Asian countries as well as Australia, Brazil, and other suppliers of raw materials.

There are only three ways to meet the unpaid bills of a nation. The first is taxation. The second is repudiation. The third is inflation.

There can be economy only where there is efficiency.

Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation – not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago.

Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.

As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I’m concerned about the recklessness of public policy that endangers people’s lives, especially in minority communities, where crime often is such a scourge.

We’re still in a recession. We’re not gonna be out of it for a while, but we will get out.

Nobody believes in completely unadulterated capitalism.

Now you have a choice: we can give more tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, or we can start rewarding companies that open new plants and train new workers and create new jobs here, in the United States of America.

As capitalism falters, the rich move their money out of the country, violence increases, and politicians promising prosperity are elected.

Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man.

Recession is when a neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours.

It is the interest of the commercial world that wealth should be found everywhere.

It isn’t enough just to scream at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. We need our political system to start reflect this anger back into, ‚How do we fix it? How do we get the economy going again?‘

No other country in the world does what we do. On every issue, the world turns to us, not simply because of the size of our economy or our military might – but because of the ideals we stand for, and the burdens we bear to advance them.

My task over the last two years hasn’t just been to stop the bleeding. My task has also been to try to figure out how do we address some of the structural problems in the economy that have prevented more Googles from being created.

We also cannot allow Wall Street banks to rewrite the Second Amendment just because they’re too big to fail.