Paul Ryan Quotes

Outside of the family, education is the greatest determinant of social mobility.

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.

Mr. Lincoln's elevation shows that in America every station in life may be honorable; that there is no barrier against the humblest; but that merit, wherever it exists, has the opportunity to be known.

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

I don't know how you can move out of one's socioeconomic category if you don't have education.

Our aristocracy, unlike that of Europe, is open to all comers.

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.

Slowly but surely the old establishment is being replaced by a new, larger, more meritocratic middle class—a middle class that will include millions of people who traditionally may see themselves as working class but whose ambitions are far broader than their parents and grandparents.

That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.

In a thriving economy, birth need not be destiny.

The charm of Britain has always been the ease with which one can move into the middle class.

In this respect, higher education is now causing most of the growing inequality and strengthening class structure of the United States.

The upwardly mobile American is becoming a statistical oddity..

There is no employing class, no working class, no farming class. You may pigeonhole a man or woman as a farmer or a worker or a professional man or an employer or even a banker. But the son of the farmer will be a doctor or a worker or even a banker, and his daughter a teacher. The son of a worker will be an employer - or maybe president.

Upward mobility across classes peaked in the U.S. in the late 19th century. Most of the gains of the 20th century were achieved en masse; it wasn't so much a phenomenon of great numbers of people rising from one class to the next as it was standards of living rising sharply for all classes. You didn't have to be exceptional to rise.

I think that social migration to another economic class requires a kind of negotiating with yourself. And also, there's so much ambivalence in your heart about who you are and who you're really not.

In gay culture hookups are a way of escaping your class.

In Caribbean there is no middle class: you're either rich or you're poor. And the ladder to success is not really a ladder, it's a chain; once you reach a certain level, you can't go back and you can only keep going forward.

For all the chatter that Britain has moved beyond class, recent studies have found that it determines the life chances of British people more today than at any point since the Second World War... A child born into a rich family in Britain will almost certainly live and die rich, while a child born into a poor family will almost certainly live and die poor.

What I have been talking about for many years is opportunity conservatism, that every policy should focus like a laser on easing the means of ascent up the economic ladder.

There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.

I just think the whole discussion of class is wrong. It's not what we do here in America. I don't think there's anything called 'middle class values' that are different from the values of other people in this country.

France has the least social mobility of any developed country. The social elevator no longer works. It's broken.

And I am interested in the fact that class is very much a factor in America, even though it's not supposed to be.

It's true: one of the things that I've always thought about American society is that you never get the sort of natural politicisation of class consciousness that you would get in the United Kingdom or even in Australia.