Julian Assange Quotes

Let's talk about why, in the 1990s, Wall Street got deregulated. Did it have anything to do with the fact that Wall Street provided - spent billions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions? Well, some people might think, yeah, that had some influence.

Business has to have capital.I think Wall Street is a necessary ingredient of the global economy, you've just got to keep people realizing that helping clients is the most important thing, not helping yourself.

Quite obviously power will continue to play a central role in global politics as it always does. But usually there is something else.

I was there in Washington in the '90s. It was pretty bad then. It's much worse now [in 2015]. And that vicious cycle is you've got again big corporations, executives, Wall Street, very wealthy individuals in both parties who are calling the shots.

Wall Street is at best ambivalent. The size of the accounts is nothing big. How many Wall Street firms do you know that are running after people with $5,000 accounts?

The disconnect I was experiencing was that people hated Wall Street, but they loved tech.

Hillary Clinton did try to reach out to the Sanders voters with policy concessions, but Sanders voters, especially his most activist core, are process people. They're not policy wonks. They're people who want big money out of politics. They're people who want fairness from the DNC chair. They're people who want every vote to count. They're the people who don't like Wall Street money. Right? They're primarily about the process of politics and whether or not it's fair and whether or not big-money elites are rigging things in your favor.

One of the things that I heard for years and years, never drive Russia and China together. And Obama has done that.

John Kerry knows more about more subjects than an awful lot of people. But I think it's a very hard job [Secretary of State].

It is easier to disrupt consumer finance. It is much harder to disrupt institutional finance, Wall Street. It is very heavily regulated, and because it is institutional finance, you are dealing with incumbents.

With Albright at the helm of the State Department, Osama bin Laden ran wild throughout the Middle East, the North Koreans began feverishly building nukes under her nose, and we staged a pre-emptive attack solely for purposes of regime change based on false information presented to the American people by Albright about a world leader who was not an imminent threat to the United States. Slobodan Milosevic wasn't even a latent, long-term, hypothetical threat.

Maybe we should be directing our anger elsewhere - like toward Wall Street. Why is it we never think of Big Business when we think of welfare recipients? Companies take more of our tax dollars, and in much more questionable ways, than do those who are trying to heat their apartments with a kerosene stove.

I am very proud to be the only candidate up here who does not have a Super PAC, who's not raising huge sums of money from Wall Street...

Facts are that the financial advisers on Wall Street today or anywhere depending on which firm, what point in time - 85 to 88 percent male, and that is part of why investing for women they tell us feels unapproachable because they don't see people who look like them.

Foreign policy is about US national security, it is definitely not non-intervention. It is definitely not isolationist. That's where people want to hear what they want to hear and not listen to what Donald Trump says. It is about national security for the United States, and that's fine.

When I was a Senator from New York, I represented and worked with so many talented principled people who made their living in finance. But even thought I represented them and did all I could to make sure they continued to prosper, I called for closing the carried interest loophole and addressing skyrocketing CEO pay. I also was calling in '06, '07 for doing something about the mortgage crisis, because I saw every day from Wall Street literally to main streets across New York how a well-functioning financial system is essential.

The lobbying over China most favored nation trading status was disgusting. There's no way in hell that MFN would have passed in '95, '96, '97, '98, '99, 2000 if all these companies hadn't come in flooding and making campaign contributions and ask for people's support. That drove the debate. Every year was the allure of corporate dollars flooding into members' bank accounts.

Hillary Clinton has perfected the politics of personal profit and theft. She ran the State Department like her own personal hedge fund, doing favors for oppressive regimes and many others in exchange for cash. Then when she left, she made $21.6 million giving speeches to Wall Street banks and other special interests in less than two years - secret speeches that she does not want to reveal to the public. Lobbyists, CEOs, and foreign governments totally own her, and that will never change if she ever became president.

There was a certain faction in America that had always been pro-Nazi, including the Allen Dulles people. These were businessmen, Wall Street men.

Foreign policy is conducted for the convenience and enjoyment of people in Washington.

What I always say with these things, when you're trying to do comprehensive things like tax reform, there will be 20,000 lobbyists in Washington trying to work their will on that piece of legislation so, you know, people think it's going to be a lot easier than it will end up being.

I think that Goldman Sachs and the Pentagon determine more of America's outcome then any president or any congress, that sounds a bit cynical, but I think I am right.

[Donald Trump] has nothing to show for it but fear in every way. To people who are sick, fear, to people who are immigrants, fear, to people who are concerned about the greed on Wall Street taking us back to where we were.

The only people I know getting in high places by running their mouth are politicians.

From the weak nations' point of view, it is better if there are many powerful countries then if there are just a few. The more concentrated is power, the fewer opportunities there are to move. Space for change, space for freedom to implement change is then very narrow; very small.