Paul Ryan Quotes

The future of America is not an entitlement. We have been given a treasure chest of gifts and opportunities, but some people are being left behind, and success is not sustainable unless it is shared.

The thought of my children growing up in an America with less freedom, less opportunity, and a lower standard of living is a long-term pain I cannot and will not bear.

Through our own hard work and ingenuity, America has spent much of its history as the world's dominant economic power. But our dominance is not pre-ordained - history does not roll along on the wheels of inevitability.

My parents didn't have the opportunities they would have liked, but they didn't complain about that because they thought they were part of a society where the next generation would have those opportunities.

My generation could be the first in Hong Kong to be worse off than our parents.

You've got first-generation Americans here who are going to be poorer than their parents. That's never happened in the States before, and it's going to have massive social repercussions here.

History shows that when you have continuing income inequality it is an invitation to class conflict.

Every thing is moving and changing. Persons in poverty, are rising to opulence, and persons of wealth, are sinking to poverty.

There is one iron law of history. When a country’s economy starts to decline, if it continues to decline, it will lose its greatness.

The middle class took the taxpayers money and benefits to go to school and get rich and now they don’t want to pay the taxes to pay for the poor of the next generation to have the same opportunity.

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

Since the equality of fortunes reigns in the North, and slavery does not exist there, man finds himself absorbed with those same material wants which the white man disdains in the South. He knows it admirable to take advantage of nature and men to produce riches.

America is a young country, with small inequalities of property, and without manufactures. Few people are here dependent on the rich, for every man has an opportunity of becoming rich himself…the people of New England enjoy an equality of condition unknown in any other part of the world.

Like Venice’s oligarchs, America’s super-rich are destroying the social mobility that creates wealth.

Capitalism is taking away all the opportunity from our children and grandchildren.

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.

Americans have historically been more willing than Europeans to tolerate high inequality levels if accompanied by strong economic growth and a healthy middle class.

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

The Alliance for Progress is an alliance between one millionaire and many beggars.

Throughout the world, and in all ages, freedom has advanced with every increase in the ratio of wealth to population....

There may not be as many rich individuals, but there will be far less poor.

American and world history show that if you want minimal government, you can have it—but only if you want almost everyone in your society also to be a dirt-poor, subsistence farmer. If you want a prosperous, growing modern economy, you need high specialization and a huge, complex, interdependent network of individuals, businesses, research centers and education. And only government has the authority or money to regulate that network and to regularly pump in the targeted funds needed to sustain and grow it.

The Declaration of Independence promised citizens equal access to economic opportunity. This was the powerful principle for which men were willing to fight the American Revolution, but it was never codified in law. When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they assumed that the country's vast resources would ensure equality of opportunity.

It's very hard to persuade a young person who has seen the Great Recession, who has seen all the problems with inequality, to tell them inequality is not important and that markets are always efficient. They'd think you're crazy.

Rising inequality has changed family dynamics for all socioeconomic groups.