I'm a mother of five, and raising five babies, little children, you have to make use of time in a very effective way. So, I think that may have trained me.
My daughter Alexandra once told me, "Mother, you're a pioneer. Now, hardly anybody cooks, but you were one of the first to stop." After 20 years of cooking, I started to appreciate the value of other people's work. So I would, say, go get a duck in Chinatown. I always had the salad and set the table, but I didn't have to clean the pots.
When President [Barack] Obama was sworn in on the steps of Capitol, he asked for swift, bold action now for jobs and education for the 21st Century, a list, an agenda. One week and one day from that swearing in, the House passed the ARRA, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
I think about my parents all the time, especially on Sunday when I'm at Mass. My mother always said, 'We do not pray to win elections. We pray for people's health, we pray that God's will be done, we pray that we do our best. But we do not pray to win elections.'
I'm Nancy Pelosi, but my grandchildren call me Mimi. For me, politics is an extension of my role as a mother and a grandmother. For the Democratic women of the House, our work is not about the next election, but rather the next generation.
I don't reject the concept of preemptive war. I'm a mother of five. I have five grandchildren. And I always say: Think of a lioness. Think of a mother bear. You come anywhere near our cubs, you're dead. And so, in terms of any threat to our country, people have to know we'll be there to preemptively strike. But what the president [Bush] did was, on the basis of no real intelligence for an imminent threat to our country, chose to go into a war for reasons that are still unknown to us.