Do Won Chang Quotes

I grew up believing in meritocracy and the American dream. My parents came here from India. They had no connections. My brother and I went to public schools, and both of us succeeded.

Of course, preserving the American dream has always meant creating opportunity for the most recently arrived Americans - those who have come here from other parts of the globe to work hard and build a new, better life.

Every business decision I ever made I learned from my grandfather Papa Sam. He moved here from Russia when he was a boy. He worked his way up selling newspapers and ladies' handbags, and eventually, he became Cadillac Sam, one of the biggest car dealers in Chicago.

I'm very pro-American - my entire family escaped poverty in Italy because they rightly believed in the American dream.

I want people to understand my journey and to be inspired by that. You can be an immigrant, and if you work really hard, you can have your own restaurant.

I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.

To the European immigrant - that is, to the aliens who have been converted into Americans by the advantages of American life - the Promise of America has consisted largely in the opportunity which it offered of economic independence and prosperity.

My mother was a full-time mom, and Dad started his own business. He was a mini-American dream story. Came from Russia at age 4, started his own pen business in Brooklyn. The company isn't around now, but he created his own healthy little world, leaving a decent legacy. My dad taught at Cooper Union but was never fully graduated himself.

I am an immigrant from Mexico. I came to the United States looking for a landscape where I could explore ideas freely and to test my entrepreneurial spirit.

Tonight, the daughter of an immigrant from Italy has been chosen to run for vice president in the new land my father came to love.

It's a universal story, it's an immigrant story, and it's a love story. In the United States, if you believe in yourself and you're determined and persevere, you're going to succeed.

We're different men [with Donald Trump], different life experiences. But I've always been struck by our common heritage. His grandfather immigrated to this country just like my grandfather. His dad was a self-made businessman, who built up a business with his two hands. And my dad followed his dreams to Columbus, Indiana, helped build a small business in that town.

I reflect back on my mom's journey, someone who was an immigrant to Canada and came not knowing anything and figured it out tremendously. I reflect back on that a lot.

As an immigrant, I have lived, in a way, the American dream, and I want to make sure that opportunity is available for everybody.

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.

Donald Trump is living proof of the American Dream. A kid from Queens, New York, who made it big. And, yeah - he'll be the first to tell you he isn't perfect. But who is?

I consider myself an embodiment of the American dream: an all-American Indian.

My grandfather and his wife came to America at the end of the 19th century from Hungary. Everyone started out on the Lower East Side. They became embourgeoise and would move to the Upper West Side. Then, if they'd make money, they'd move to Park Avenue. Their kids would become artists and move down to the Lower East Side and the Village.

I play for the America that embraces refugees from war-torn nations, for the America that welcomes all people who want the chance to experience the American Dream, for the America that appreciates the contributions from all the people it shelters.

New York was the Promised Land growing up. Writers were gods! The great gods of American culture... I thought.

Some of the most important discoveries, innovations, and advances in our history have come from those seeking a new life in America.

I've long believed that one of the mainsprings of our own liberty has been the widespread ownership of property among our people and the expectation that anyone's child, even from the humblest of families, could grow up to own a business or a corporation. Thomas Jefferson dreamed of a land of small farmers, of shopowners, and merchants. Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Homestead Act that ensured that the great western prairies of America would be the realm of independent, propertyowning citizens-a mightier guarantee of freedom is difficult to imagine.

The United States is probably the most [socially] mobile society in the history of the world. The virtues that are most valuable in it are diligence, discipline, ambition, and a willingness to take risks. Education and credentials are most important in government; elsewhere most skills are learned on the job.

My father stood behind a bar in the back of the room all those years, so one day I could stand behind a podium in the front of a room. That journey, from behind that bar to behind this podium, goes to the essence of the American miracle - that we're exceptional not because we have more rich people here. We're special because dreams that are impossible anywhere else, come true here.

Maybe the American Dream is too rich for us now in the U.S. Maybe we're losing it because we are not like our Swedish grandmother who came across the plains, hacked down the trees, and took the Spanish words she encountered and made them hers. Now her great-great-grandchildren sit terrified, wondering what to do with all these Mexicans. The American Dream is an impossible affirmation of possibility. And maybe native-born Americans don't have it anymore. Maybe it has run through their fingers.