Ted Lieu Quotes

It was an honor and privilege to arrive to this country 16 years ago with almost no money in my pocket. A lot has happened since then.

For generations, people have come to U.S. shores to seek opportunity. It's what my grandfather did a century ago, when he came to Seattle, and worked as a houseboy just one mile from the Washington State governor's mansion that I was privileged to inhabit for eight years.

We all should be proud of the United States. For those of us that came from the Dominican, we've been able to come here, work, make money and become somebody in our lives. We've gotten a huge opportunity from the U.S.

I feel that The American Dream is this fallacy that you come to the United States and win lotto. That's a disservice to The American Dream because the American Dream is worth striving for. And it's not easy.

Donald Trump's own mother Mary escaped the bone-crushing poverty of Scotland's remote Outer Hebrides for the promise of New York in 1929.

The U.S. is where I was given the greatest opportunity to turn my life from a very nice one to an exceptional one.

I like to make films about how people survive living in the United States.

I know what it feels like to be a young family looking for opportunity in the United States.

We talk about the American Dream, and want to tell the world about the American Dream, but what is that Dream, in most cases, but the dream of material things? I sometimes think that the United States for this reason is the greatest failure the world has ever seen.

People are not trying to get into China, they're trying to get out of China. The United States is the only great country where people are trying to get into to this country for obvious reasons.

I came to this country when I was 12 years old because my parents wanted to give me new opportunities to succeed. President Obama wants everyone to have the chances I had.

When I got outta High School I was driving a truck. I was just a poor boy from Memphis, Memphis.

I really feel that my life story is a continuation of the Great American Dream - the immigrant who comes to this country and is allowed to excel. How many other countries would let me do that?

I like coming to the United States because the United States played an important role in my life.

Living in New York City, I am reminded by the Statue of Liberty that the United States of America has always welcomed those yearning to breathe free and seek a better life.

My parents came to the United States in the early years of this century as part of a wave of Russian Jewish immigrants seeking freedom and opportunity in the New World.

In Romania, of course, gymnastics is among the most popular sports, and my parents had a dream of escaping the Ceausescu regime and giving their child a better life. So they came to the United States and put me in gymnastics.

America was born in outrageous ambition, so bold as to be improbable. The deprived, the oppressed, the powerless from all over the globe came here with little more than the desire to realize themselves.

When I was back in Cuba, who could have imagined I would be invited to the White House!

My parents were lured to America by the democracy here promised. In our family, freedom was a word to conjure by. Hoping for larger privileges for the growing family of children, they brought them to the New World, the world of many intellectual as well as material advantages.

When I came to America in the '60s, it was the place to be. I wonder if I'd come here today.

When my father came over here penniless with $100 sewn into his underwear, thank God some well-meaning liberal didn't come put his arm around him and say, 'Let me take care of you.'

The conventional wisdom is that people come to the United States, and immigration is so great, and they say, 'America, what a great country.' And a lot of that is true.

My parents immigrated to the United States with $10 in their pocket and a belief that the America they had heard about really did exist as the land of opportunity.

Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he's not a trash can.