By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.

In 'Wall Street,' Charlie Sheen carried that movie.

Establishing a 0.03 percent Wall Street speculation fee, similar to what we had from 1914-1966, would dampen the dangerous level of speculation and gambling on Wall Street, encourage the financial sector to invest in the productive economy and reduce the deficit by more than $350 billion over 10 years.

What Wall Street and credit card companies are doing is really not much different from what gangsters and loan sharks do who make predatory loans. While the bankers wear three-piece suits and don't break the knee caps of those who can't pay back, they still are destroying people's lives.

Wall Street has too much wealth and political power.

The idea that we're going to austerity ourselves into prosperity is so mistaken, and honestly, I feel like one of the big problems we have is that, because Democrats don't have a deep understanding of or degrees in economics, they allow Wall Street folks to roll in the door and think that they're giving them an education.

Hank Paulson, obviously, had spent his career on Wall Street, had a deep knowledge of the Street, and also was a very forceful personality, had a very good relationship with the president, and was in a very different place, for example, than Ben Bernanke, who is an academic, quiet guy: spent most of his time thinking about monetary policy.

I got into Goldman really by acquisition because I had gone - I grew up in east New York in the Linden Projects - I did go to fancy schools, but my resume wasn't up to a Wall Street set of resumes. I went to college. I went to law school and practiced for a while.

I was offered a job on Wall Street by my uncle. But I wanted to get out. Make-it-on-my-own kinda thing.

I have been an organizer and then activist and a legislator, all of that. But then there's this big gap after I advanced in Congress and ended up as the ranking member of financial services committee. It took me into the financial services issues and Wall Street and Dodd Frank. And it took me away from the things that I did years ago.

When we look at government in Washington or what's happening on Wall Street, we see so much centralization. But really, our goals should be to eliminate and overcome these central institutions. And in recent years we have gained powerful new tools to do this, and most significant among those is the block chain, which is the software behind Bitcoin.

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

'The Big Short' is, among other things, a blistering, detailed indictment of the way Wall Street does business, and its particular villains are the investment banks.

Although we work through financial markets, our goal is to help Main Street, not Wall Street.

I will always fight for peace. But, unfortunately, it is war that drives us forward. It is war that makes the major turns. It makes Wall Street function; it makes all the bastards in the Balkans function.

I left Goldman Sachs. I was thinking about going to another Wall Street place. I didn't want to do that. That was crazy. After you work on Wall Street, it's a choice: would you rather work at McDonald's or on the sell side? I would choose McDonald's over the sell side.

Have rational expectations for future returns and avoid changing those expectations in response to the ephemeral noise coming from Wall Street.

I acted all the way up until Princeton. It was just one of my favorite extracurricular activities. Then I got to Princeton and had a really conservative vibe. All my friends were planning on law school, med school, or Wall Street, and suddenly acting seem like a really risky proposition.

I served in all commissioned ranks from a second Lieutenant to a Major General. And during that time, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.

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