Aziz Ansari Quotes

I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six years old, in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon, cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms.

On both sides of my family, my grandparents grew up in total poverty and came to California during the Great Depression. The only way they were able to work their way out of that was by joining the military, which is how they both went on to be able to go to college.

A son of a poor man is standing in front of you today. This is the strength of a democracy.

Using the Africanist model, each generation should take the family name to a higher place. My father's folks were sharecroppers in South Carolina. He went to Harlem. They were still poor, but they moved up. If my parents didn't do this and offer me this background, I wouldn't be here.

And of course, we know that opportunity lies outside the reach of some of our people. We don't need flowery words about inequality to tell us that, and we don't need a party that has led while poverty and hunger rose to record levels to give us lectures about suffering.

If you go on TV and say there's no other country in the world where you can be born poor and become rich, you get a huge megaphone. If you tell the truth, which is that most of the studies show actually the United States is worse than anybody except Britain in upward mobility, there is no audience for you.

When I was leaving Yemen to come to America, things were tough. My dad had just been laid off, and it was a challenge. When I lived in Yemen, I thought America was a perfect place. Everything was bigger and better. I dreamed big. The American dream, you know? You have to work hard for your dream to come true.

I do care about not 99 percent or 95 percent. I care about the very rich and the very poor. I care about 100 percent of America.

Economic growth is necessary to keep the promise - enormously important to individual Americans - that each generation will have the opportunity to become more prosperous than the preceding one, the popular term for which is 'the American dream.'

People who work full-time in America should not have to live in poverty - simple as that. Too many jobs don't pay enough to get by, let alone get ahead. Too many people are finding the rungs on the ladder of opportunity further and further apart.

My grandfather worked in a shoe factory - he was an Italian immigrant. My father was the first to go to college in the family.

My dad was a bartender. My mom was a cashier, a maid and a stock clerk at K-Mart. They never made it big. They were never rich. And yet they were successful. Because just a few decades removed from hopelessness, they made possible for us all the things that had been impossible for them.

The biggest single challenge to America and our future is income inequality. We've got to fix it.

I am the son of poor peasants who came at a very young age to live in Algeria. I only recently saw the place where they were born, near the city of Marrakech.

As income inequality increases, social mobility falls.

The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible.

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

The percentage of American 30-year-olds in 1970 who were earning more than their parents had earned at 30? Ninety-two percent. Isn’t that amazing? That, in a nutshell, is what we call the American Dream. And what’s the percentage now? It’s somewhere around 50 percent

When our forbears - yours and mine - came to America, they came because this country promised them something. It promised them an opportunity, nourished by education, not merely to grind for a bare living, but to strive for a good life.

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.

My great grandfather emigrated from Italy, and my grandfather worked in a steel mill and was able to raise kids and have a family and go on vacation.

For the son of immigrants to run for elected office, not even a generation after my parents got here, that's what makes America a great place.

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

We didn't have shoes until we came over to America.

We were second-generation immigrants, and it was luxury enough to go to college. The luxury of the arts was still a generation away.