Ory Okolloh Quotes

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.

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

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.

Too many people feel that where you start out dictates where you should end up. I was on welfare and just shy of 19 when my first daughter was born, but I was encouraged to take advantage of my ability and drive and remained in school.

You have to give kids from ordinary families a ladder. You have to show them there's a way out.

Barack Obama was not born into wealth or privilege, yet today his is president of these United States of America. Barack Obama has lived the American Dream. He has walked in our shoes.

In the States everyone aspires to be middle class. It's so engrained into the American psyche: As long as you work hard you're going to be rich some day. The history of Britain is that if you're born working class, you're going to stay there, although that is changing.

The upwardly mobile American is becoming a statistical oddity..

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

Only in a nation like ours could someone like me, the scrappy son of a simple carpenter, grow up to become a simple senator.

If any one idea can justly be called the American idea, it is that a child's circumstances at birth should not determine the station in life that that child will occupy as an adult.

If you were brought up in the '40s, a kid in Ossining, New York, hanging out at the poolroom and stealing, how can you think, 'Here I am in Ossining. I, too, can be a movie star!'

I've sort of escaped my background, as people often do, through art and culture.

I didn't necessarily grow up in a trailer park, but there is a brief part of that in my life. So I can make fun of it a little bit. I'm not too much of an outsider, where I'm just making fun of someone.

America is the student who defies the odds to become the first in a family to go to college - the citizen who defies the cynics and goes out there and votes - the young person who comes out of the shadows to demand the right to dream. That's what America is about.

I was poor white trash, no glitter, no glamour, but I'm not ashamed of anything.

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

People ask how can a Jewish kid from the Bronx do preppy clothes? Does it have to do with class and money? It has to do with dreams.

My presence here is one additional bit of evidence that the American dream need not be deferred.

Human beings are no longer born to their place in life

Where else can a guy like me make it? Blind and poor---only in America.

I am not a product of privilege, I am a product of opportunity

In a thriving economy, birth need not be destiny.

The Great Gatsby Curve

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