Jay Mohr Quotes

My parents were determined to move into the middle class.

There is no greater ladder into the middle class than education.

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

The upwardly mobile American is becoming a statistical oddity..

People want to feel aspirational; they want to feel that they can move to the next socioeconomic class.

My parents climbed their way to the middle class.

I'm a proud product of the American middle class.

70% of children born into poverty will never make it to the middle class. The uncomfortable truth is that there are now a number of other countries with as much or more opportunity than ours. In fact, more people in Canada go on to surpass the income of their parents than in the United States.

While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of "rags to riches" were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control.

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.

The middle class is both real and aspirational. And I want to make sure that it remains strong and it gives people a sense of security and confidence and optimism about their futures.

Social change rarely comes about through the efforts of the disenfranchised. The middle class creates social revolutions.

We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.

By the time I was in my early teens, we were able to move into a much more middle-class area. I had a comfortable adolescence.

Today, the message is that we have to help the middle class and the aspirational worker in the United States.

The middle class in America is at a tipping point. It will not last another generation if we don't boldly change course now.

All great men come out of the middle classes.

I love my cross-sectioned, cross-cultural audience. Some of them are doing better than the average guy, but my audience has always been people who are struggling to stay in the middle class.

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

The overtime threshold is to the middle class as the minimum wage is to low-wage workers.

I think we need not only to eliminate the tollbooth to the middle class, I think we should knock down the tollbooth.

Middle income families with children are Australia’s new poor

The trajectory of this country [USA] is not positive and particularly for the disadvantaged, as we see what's happening. The gains in productivity have dropped, the gains in income for the middle class and the least advantaged have slowed, at best.

We're going to start seeing that it's actually less about race and more about class in the future. As much as we complain about the establishment discriminating against black people, we're going to start seeing that more of us are already in the establishment.