Ayanna Pressley Quotes

Illinois has less than a 12 percent black population and I won with 55 percent of the vote.

I think the legacy of the civil rights movement is that now whites are more open to being represented by people of color or people who are women or, again, non-traditional candidates.

I think we need to have more women in the Republican Party talking about what it is we're trying to do for families.

I ran for the presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo. The next time a woman runs, or a black, a Jew, or anyone from a group that the country is 'not ready' to elect to its highest office, I believe that he or she will be taken seriously from the start.

I think it's important to always have diversity, in our Congress or anywhere, but you also need diversity not just for women of color who are most underrepresented, but diversity in different walks of life.

I think, I want to see a Republican Party that has more folks that, that look and sound and operate like I do.

Mr. Cain would structurally change the voting demographic. There would be more black economic conservatives, and the Democrats would lose their stranglehold on the black vote.

It's not impossible for a woman - a Black woman - to become President.

Obviously I'm young and I'm also Hispanic, two important groups in this election. And I'm confident that I can do a good job in articulating why President Obama ought to be the candidate that Americans select for the next four years.

We need candidate schools to recruit more young African-Americans to run for office and more diverse law enforcement communities.

You had 42 blacks that ran on the Republican ticket this Cycle, 14 made of them made it to the general election and two of us made it to the House of Representatives. So I think that there is a new movement that needs to have a voice in the Congressional Black Caucus.

The Democratic Party has taken the black community for granted and said, 'This is the most loyal constituency we have. They're not going anywhere.' But the Republican Party has said, 'That's the most loyal constituency Democrats have. They're not going anywhere. We've got to win without them.'

I tried to make the point to the [Nixon] White House that, as a party, we needed to demonstrate that we cared and were concerned about votes from African-Americans and Hispanics. I don't know where we lost track after Abraham Lincoln.

If you are a representative, and poor people don’t vote, you’re not going to pay particular attention to the needs of the poor.

We'll get out the [black] vote, but we need the white vote to win.

I am a woman, a Democrat and a Brown.

The Negro has not only come into the Democratic Party, but the Negro has come into control of the Democratic Party.

If we don't like what the Republicans do, we need to get in there and change it.... By the turn of the century it'll be a 95 percent white Republican Party and a 99 percent black Democratic Party. That's not what we need.

The natural result of people preferring one of their own race is that a minority race president will find it hard to get elected, and so it's something we should do something about and which we can do something about.

That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black, and a woman proves, I would think, that our society is not yet either just or free.

Children today will grow up taking for granted that an African-American or a woman can, yes, become the president of the United States.

I don't support white supremacy. I'm the one who made them take 'white supremacy' off the roster that was the symbol of the Democratic Party in this state.

It's so deeply disturbing to me that half of the eligible voters don't vote in this country. We talk about how divided the country is. The truth is, we don't even know. We just know what the half that voted thought.

I want to make sure we have elected people constantly looking at helping the African-American community.

There's a viewpoint that says, 'I can fight for minorities, and I can fight for women,' and if you get that, you make up a vast majority of the voting block, and you win. And white males have been left aside a little bit in the politics of who speaks to them.