Ellen Goodman Quotes

The American dream is still to own your home.

Part of the American dream is to own your own property - something no one can take from you.

It is a comfortable feeling to know that you stand on your own ground. Land is about the only thing that can't fly away.

There have been few things in my life which have had a more genial effect on my mind than the possession of a piece of land.

Many a man who pays rent all his life owns his own home; and many a family has successfully saved for a home only to find itself at last with nothing but a house.

Owning a home is a keystone of wealth - both financial affluence and emotional security.

When I began to make some money, I really wanted to have a home.

We don't know, ultimately, if we'll end up in San Francisco, but we're talking about keeping the house. It would be nice to always have a place here.

For all the huffing and puffing of the doubters, a home of our own is still the rock on which our hopes are built. Price appreciation aside (and most houses will appreciate, eventually), homeownership is a state of mind. It's your piece of the earth. It's where a family's toes grow roots. It's where the flowers are yours, not God's.

From that house there has come so much life that it ought never to die or fall into ruin... For me that house was a gateway to America.

That is the heart and soul of the American dream, homeownership, the idea of being able to buy a house and start to build your family.

Well, actually, if you can stay in your home that is a better deal for the neighborhood. It's certainly a better deal for the person that is in their home, rather than to be on the street and for that house to go into foreclosure and become a problem for the whole community.

For many of us, owning a home signaled a passage into adulthood that coincided with the start of a career and family.

I grew up thinking that renting is perfectly normal. And then, strangely enough, I never did buy a house. I live in New York City, and I'm still renting. My own personal narrative shows that it is possible to live a respectable life without ever having owned a home.

The Hispanic community understands the American Dream and have not forgotten what they were promised - that in the U.S., a free market system, allows us all to succeed economically, achieve stability and security for your family and leave your children better off than yourselves.

The American Dream is one of success, home ownership, college education for one's children, and have a secure job to provide these and other goals.

My grandparents used to tell me stories about their trip to Ellis Island from Russia and life on the Lower East Side of New York.

The best thing I've done with my money is buy a house for my family. You wake up to a house you love and you feel like somebody.

It's great to have a home and everything else that comes with it.

I remember when my mother, Shyamala Harris, bought our first home. I was thirteen. She was so proud, and my sister and I were so excited. Millions of Americans know that feeling of walking through the front door of their own home for the first time - the feeling of reaching for opportunity and finding it.

With the world as it now presents itself, there is something perverse, and probably dysfunctional, about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome, the school-lottery migration, the property portfolio neurosis? Have you no imagination?

I like owning dirt. You know, I spent a lot of time broke when I moved to California. So deep in my soul is still this idea of being unemployed. To me, owning land means you could sell it at some point and have money.

Owning your own home is America's unique recipe for avoiding revolution and promoting pseudo-equality at the same time.

American opportunity, the treasure no thief could touch … It was the one thing he [her father] was able to promise us when he sent for us; surer, safer than bread or shelter.

No man who owns his own home and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do.