Betsy DeVos Quotes

The fact is that, except for those very few whose wealth is overwhelmingly or entirely inherited, the more affluent have usually worked harder than the less affluent.

Maybe it’s that silver spoon in his [Mitt Romney’s] mouth that keeps him from seeing why the middle class doesn’t pull itself up by its bootstraps, like he did when Daddy loaned him his first million dollars.

For lots of people who became rich, they believe they earned their fortune through hard work. They don't think about society and only want to leave their fortune to their children.

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

I come from an extremely modest background. So now I have way more than what I'm used to.

I never met a poor person who wanted to soak the rich; they want to get rich.

When the idle poor become the idle rich, you'll never know just who is who, or which is which.

No matter how wealthy a few plutocrats get, we can never drive a great national economy. Only a thriving middle class can do that.

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

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

We certainly want those at the top to do well, but if you base your entire presidency and your entire economic platform on helping them do even better, you're missing what makes the economy tick. Because not everyone has been as fortunate as Mitt Romney, you cannot base your whole approach on a life experience as rarified as his.

I don't mind the rich getting richer, but the poor shouldn't be getting poorer, and there should be more people moving into the middle class.

My uncle was the first brown person to have a market stall on Petticoat Lane in the 1960s. He worked his way up from the street. He was homeless, but eventually he got a car so he could sell from the boot. And by the 1980s, he was a millionaire wholesaling to companies like Topshop. So in a way, fashion put me in England.

My parents were determined to move into the middle class.

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.

But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.

As someone who came to New York in the 1970s, I was, like so many of my friends, a certified member of what we now call the 99 percent - and I was a lot closer to the bottom than to the top of that 99 percent. At some point during the intervening years, I moved into the 1 percent.

In America today, a young person needs more education after high school just to have a chance to make it in the middle class. Not a guarantee, just a chance to make it.

There are a lot of Americans who do not realize that their financial comfort is a consequence of conditions and programs in this country that made it possible for them to be wealthy.

Like Venice’s oligarchs, America’s super-rich are destroying the social mobility that creates wealth.

The upwardly mobile American is becoming a statistical oddity..

A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have something equivalent in an additional decade.

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.

Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth.

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.'