Stuart Appleby Quotes

My father worked in a post office and never made probably more than $8,000 a year as an employee of the post office, so when people can rise up from very modest circumstances and do well economically, I think that's a good thing about America, and we should encourage that kind of activity.

Where else can a guy like me make it? Blind and poor---only in America.

The hard-working Mexican tries to get up here looking for opportunities because America's one of the greatest countries in the world.

I am but a generation removed from poverty and despair. Where would I be today if there had never been an America? What kind of lives or future would my children have if this was not a land of opportunity?

President Obama is a principled man who has worked hard to put healthcare and a good education in the reach of millions of Americans and believes that everyone who works hard and plays by the rules, should have a fair shot at the American dream.

I was born in Nagpur and brought up in Ahmedabad, where my father had a small factory.

New York means so much to people. If you're inclined to leave the nest, New York is where most people think they have to go, and it's been that way since the first skyscraper.

America offers the most amount of people the best opportunity to pursue happiness on the planet. That's why millions of illegal immigrants have poured into the country - most of them poor. They believe they have a shot to improve themselves economically.

According to a new survey, 40 percent of adults in Mexico say they would move to the United States if they got a chance. The number would have been higher, but the other 60 percent already live here.

After working for 14 years on Wall Street and growing up in a family with strong roots in small business, I know how important the entrepreneurial spirit is to attaining the American dream.

To the European immigrant - that is, to the aliens who have been converted into Americans by the advantages of American life - the Promise of America has consisted largely in the opportunity which it offered of economic independence and prosperity.

Immigrants have always come into the country with low levels of education. Whether it's the Irish or Italian or Polish, here is the land of opportunity. It's where people come in at the bottom and build themselves up. To try to bring in people who have already made it is un-American.

When you're a Republican Latino, you're traveling uphill on a lonely road. Still, it's the road I prefer. It has led me to opportunity far beyond my dreams. I've worked on eight Republican presidential races, as well as for some of the world's largest corporations, all because the doors of opportunity, not the doors of welfare, were open to me.

What, after all, is the narrative of 'the American Dream?' It was a discourse formulated between the 1880s and the 1920s in the United States during the great waves of migration and expansion and reforms of the Progressive Era.

The idea that America is the best place in the world to start out poor, so long as you are willing to work hard, no longer seems to be true. One way of proving that is to ask how accurately your family's income when you were growing up predicted what your own would be. If the American dream were alive, your family's income would not predict your own that well…. Well, on that measure, America is now less the land of opportunity than France, than Germany, than Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. The only other rich economy that the U.S. outscores in this respect is — you guessed it — the UK. Abolish the estate tax and America will be a serious contender for the bottom of the opportunity league.

Europeans have learned of the immense extent of our country and its limitless resources … They have also begun, or soon will begin, to learn of the Homestead law and provisions for securing to every man not only life, liberty and the freedom to pursue happiness but also the means of gaining an independent livelihood.

$5 a day was what Mr. Ford said, and Negroes came hundreds of miles to line up outside his employment offices.

Everybody in America must have a sense that he can get a job and a have a decent standard of living.

You’re twice as likely to realize the American Dream if you’re growing up in Canada rather than the U.S.

The percentage of American 30-year-olds in 1970 who were earning more than their parents had earned at 30? Ninety-two percent. Isn’t that amazing? That, in a nutshell, is what we call the American Dream. And what’s the percentage now? It’s somewhere around 50 percent

France is different from the U.S.A.'s El Dorado, American Dream image.

Many people should leave struggling places in search of economic opportunity, and many of them won't be able to return. Some people will move back to their hometowns; others, like me, will move back to their home state.

I came to America because this is a country defined by ladders of opportunity.

I came here because I wanted to live the American dream that I had heard of. And I'm a perfect example. I came to New York; I knew no one. I've made a career, a life, so I still believe in that.

I went from the projects to a real house. It was a big difference.