Marco Rubio Quotes

70% of children born into poverty will never make it to the middle class. The uncomfortable truth is that there are now a number of other countries with as much or more opportunity than ours. In fact, more people in Canada go on to surpass the income of their parents than in the United States.

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

America is not another word for Opportunity to all her sons.

My father worked in a post office and never made probably more than $8,000 a year as an employee of the post office, so when people can rise up from very modest circumstances and do well economically, I think that's a good thing about America, and we should encourage that kind of activity.

Immigrants have always come into the country with low levels of education. Whether it's the Irish or Italian or Polish, here is the land of opportunity. It's where people come in at the bottom and build themselves up. To try to bring in people who have already made it is un-American.

It might be that my poverty is my fault—the result of my ineptitude or my laziness. However, is there any way that the poverty that my child is condemned to is his fault? He certainly does not have the same opportunity as my child would if I were rich. But where then is our equality of opportunity?

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

If you are a pregnant teenage poor girl, you will not likely ever get out of poverty. Nor will your children. Birth control can be the most cost effective anti-poverty possibility that we have.

The percentage of American 30-year-olds in 1970 who were earning more than their parents had earned at 30? Ninety-two percent. Isn’t that amazing? That, in a nutshell, is what we call the American Dream. And what’s the percentage now? It’s somewhere around 50 percent

The American dream itself is declining.

If you grew up in a lower-income community, or less well-off, the belief is that the way to change that circumstance is through education.

America has tolerated inequality because people think they can get ahead. If you have immobility on top of inequality, then people are not going to be happy campers. If you're stuck on the bottom and there just isn't much churning in society and you're stuck there through your adulthood, that's not a nice life to look forward to.

America is still the land of opportunity for most, but it is not a land of opportunity for all. If we are to remain an exceptional nation, we must close this gap in opportunity.

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.

If you go on TV and say there's no other country in the world where you can be born poor and become rich, you get a huge megaphone. If you tell the truth, which is that most of the studies show actually the United States is worse than anybody except Britain in upward mobility, there is no audience for you.

The United States is no longer first in the world in upward mobility. We can reverse that trend by giving our young children an equal start in life as they begin their journey to fulfill the American Dream.

I grew up in a family that nearly lost everything, but I ended up in the United States Senate because I grew up in an America that invested in kids like me and built a real future for us.

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..

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.

I came to America because this is a country defined by ladders of opportunity.

That's one thing you Americans take for granted, you know? That you can grow up, you know, not so good circumstances, and you can move. Just because you are born in rural Arkansas, whatever, that doesn't define who you are.

I was born to a single mother and often struggled to find my next meal. With the right opportunities from public education and mentors, I achieved the American dream.

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.

I don't know that I ever bought into the "American dream." I was a child of privilege. I grew up in the '50s and it was a quiet time in America, at least on the surface and I grew up in a kind of feathery bed of privilege.