Alfred Marshall Quotes

There's no future in being poor.

For people who are at the bottom economically, the world is becoming a harder and harder place. And yet the incentives to become rich are so great because enormous amounts of wealth are being accumulated. And so those two things, that carrot and stick, are beating people along this trajectory of trying desperately to move up in the world.

Coming from where I came from, it was unimaginable to ever be wealthy. That was just too far out of my reach.

As a lower-class kid, I was raised to think success would be owning stuff. Having that great job, too. Now I find my parents' dream was wrong. You never really own anything. And you're never really finished as a person.

I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money.

I often think what it was like not to have much money. I don't think it's good for people to be born into money and not know what it is never to have it.

The middle class is the group in this country that has been taken for a ride.

If Eleanor Roosevelt has her way, how are we going to tell the rich from the poor?

As income inequality increases, social mobility falls.

There may not be as many rich individuals, but there will be far less poor.

We have a choice: we can allow the growing disparity between rich and poor to continue unimpeded, or we can take action to budget responsibly and strengthen and expand the middle class. If we want this economy - and this country - to meet its full potential, the choice is simple.

It's not in our nature. Americans have never been a people that drive through a nice neighborhood and say, 'Oh, I hate the people who live in these nice houses.'

I grew up in the middle class.

Even though Mr. Trump is a billionaire, he is still able to relate to average working men and women. The billionaire gets along with the bricklayer.

I felt like any other American kid. I already worked at a steady job as an ice cream scooper, but I didn't feel less in any way than my more affluent friends from school.

Increasingly, staying in the middle class - let alone aspiring to become middle class - is becoming a game of chance.

Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their status. They didn't mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility in a sense - the idea that anyone can make it.

Most of the time in America, we're surrounded by oppressive inequality such that the wealthiest 1 percent collectively own substantially more than the bottom 90 percent. One escape from that is America's wild places.

I don't feel like a wealthy person. Other people think of me as a wealthy person, but I don't. I feel the same as when I was a fifth-year associate trying to make partner at Lehman Brothers. I haven't changed.

I am who I am. I can't pretend to be somebody who makes $25,000 a year.

Bonuses balance my budget in New York City. The bigger the bonuses on Wall Street, the more money I had to spend on poor people. The New York City budget is determined greatly by the bonuses given on Wall Street.

Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.

I'm every bourgeois nightmare - a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.

Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.

The United States is a country where practically everybody considers himself middle class.