Opportunity for Advancement Quotes

Most poor people I know are proud and really want not a handout but a hand up. They do have an inherent pride and dignity, and we should treat them as those who have fallen on bad days.

In the free market, a man born into wealth or who has otherwise acquired great riches can lose his fortune depending on how he chooses to behave. Conversely, a man born into poverty or who has lost wealth once obtained can acquire a fortune, depending, again, on how he chooses to behave.

For all of its faults, it gives most hardworking people a chance to improve themselves economically, even as the deck is stacked in favor of the privileged few. Here are the choices most of us face in such a system: Get bitter or get busy.

You cannot tell a poor boy from a small country town on the plains of South Dakota who has had the opportunity to be a teacher, a mayor, a senator, and a vice president, that America is not a nation of promise.

My father couldn't speak English when he went to the first grade and I had to work in a factory over Christmas and summer vacations. And I think that's the American way and one of the things that excites me about this race is that pretty much everything I've done I've started at the bottom and been able to finish at the top.

Multiethnic character of America is very attractive to people. They also see a place where you get ahead, not because of where you came from, but because of where you want to go.

I think that's still what the American Dream means: that with perseverance, with hard work, you can become something, that the classes won't prevent you from becoming, that there's a movement up that ladder with hard work.

Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today's disadvantaged to become tomorrow's privileged and, in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a fuller and richer life.

And who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?

All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.

I grew up with a front row seat to the American dream.

The important issue is not how much inequality there is but how much opportunity there is for individuals to get out of the bottom classes and into the top. If there is enough movement upward, people will accept the efficiency of the markets. If you have opportunity, there is a great tolerance for inequality. That has been the saving grace of the American system.

If you just sort of say, everyone gets equal pay, you get away from the whole American dream, you get away from capitalism in a sense.

To all our means of culture is added the powerful incentive to personal ambition, no post of honor is so high but the poorest may hope to reach it.

Where you start in the marketplace is not where you have to stay.

What the American people hope -– what they deserve -– is for all of us, Democrats and Republicans, to work through our differences; to overcome the numbing weight of our politics. For while the people who sent us here have different backgrounds, different stories, different beliefs, the anxieties they face are the same. The aspirations they hold are shared: a job that pays the bills; a chance to get ahead; most of all, the ability to give their children a better life.