Barack Obama Quotes

My mission is to raise incomes for hard working middle class families. If you work hard and do your part you should be able to get ahead and stay ahead.

I don't know of a Democrat - whether they're a conservative, a centrist or a liberal Democrat - that doesn't think that it's important to have quality jobs that pay decent wages so that families can support themselves, so that they can have the dignity of being able to afford health care, put money aside for pension, buy a home.

Money is ammunition and the surest way I know to make lasting friends, to earn trust and create peace is by providing meaningful jobs, putting people back to work so they can feed their families.

I know why we're strong. I know why we have held together; I know why we are united: it's because there's always been a growing middle class.

And as we work together, we will build a better America! As we work together, we will bring the middle class to thrive again! As we work together, we will make sure that everybody has the ladder of opportunity to climb!

We need to make sure that people are progressively better off in work than they would be on welfare.

We've got to get back to rebuilding the middle class, the families of America. That's where growth will come from.

No matter who you are, no matter what your color, creed, how you choose to pray or who you choose to love, that if you are an American - first generation or fifth - one who is willing to work hard, play by the rules and apply your God-given talents - that you should be able to find a job that pays the bills.

Hardworking Americans are fighting every day to provide for themselves and their families, and leave a more prosperous country for the next generation.

Simply expanding Medicaid does not improve health care outcomes. In Louisiana, instead we're helping people getting better paying jobs so they can provide for their own health care.

Our growing, robust economy is able to provide the average American citizen access to the best social program there is - a steady job.

Remember, America's greatness is based on creating wealth like the rest of the world has never known, and then, making sure it's shared throughout a middle class and even the underprivileged.

What I care about is whether or not a leader will work with America's working people, whether or not a leader cares about responsibility and honest work and whether or not a leader will fight to keep the American Dream alive.

If we want to deliver opportunity for all, we need an economy that delivers jobs for the future.

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.'

A thriving middle class is a necessary precondition for a free representative government.

For globalization to work for America, it must work for working people. We should measure the success of our economy by the breadth of our middle class, and the scope of opportunity offered to the poorest child to climb into that middle class.

This is the greatest country in the world for people who want to work, but we have to make sure that this is always true..

The idea that America is the best place in the world to start out poor, so long as you are willing to work hard, no longer seems to be true. One way of proving that is to ask how accurately your family's income when you were growing up predicted what your own would be. If the American dream were alive, your family's income would not predict your own that well…. Well, on that measure, America is now less the land of opportunity than France, than Germany, than Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. The only other rich economy that the U.S. outscores in this respect is — you guessed it — the UK. Abolish the estate tax and America will be a serious contender for the bottom of the opportunity league.

Everybody in America must have a sense that he can get a job and a have a decent standard of living.

I'm someone who thinks that the world would be a better place if there was a big middle class. I mean, middle class is peace. In a perfect world, everybody would have enough to eat and we'd be living in security. It's obvious. I'm very happy to pay my taxes and all that. I would say I'm more of a Social Democrat.

There are a lot of people in the Rust Belt who felt like, 'Nobody's concerned about me, and my shot at the American dream is going away.' We need to restore that.

For me, the labor movement and public education are linked as the essential building blocks to a strong middle class and a path to the American dream. It's why I went to Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations as an undergrad and then to law school.

We can't just cut our way to prosperity. Even as we look for ways to reduce deficits over the long term, we must grow the economy in a way that strengthens the middle class and everyone willing to work hard to get into it.

If we can figure out how to give more Americans a shot in tech, a shot at the ordinary jobs that don't necessarily afford rock star status or come with generous stock options but that can sustain middle-class life, then we might just take a step toward stitching our nation back together.