David Rubenstein Quotes

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

And that is that we have never been: a nation of haves and have-nots. We are a nation of haves and soon-to-haves, of people who have made it and people who will make it. And that's who we need to remain.

We do not accept that ours will ever be a nation of haves and have-nots. We must always be a nation of haves and soon-to-haves.

What I have been talking about for many years is opportunity conservatism, that every policy should focus like a laser on easing the means of ascent up the economic ladder.

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.

Everybody in America started to define themselves by all these things they had around them. And all of a sudden it came tumbling down. So the old American dream has died, and that is a good thing.

Coming from where I came from, it was unimaginable to ever be wealthy. That was just too far out of my reach.

For income growth to occur in a society, a large fraction of people must experience changes in the possible lives they imagine for themselves and their children, and these new visions of possible futures must have enough force to lead them to change the way they behave.

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

The fact that anyone lives in America is the single reason poverty is never a death sentence, and transforms it instead into - at worst - an obstacle on the path to a better life and road to freedom and success.

I am but a generation removed from poverty and despair. Where would I be today if there had never been an America? What kind of lives or future would my children have if this was not a land of opportunity?

Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream. The American Dream is rooted in the concept that any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility, and economic security. For too long, the designers of multilateral trade deals have lost sight of this.

I never met a poor person who wanted to soak the rich; they want to get rich.

When you come from the working class and you do well enough whereby you can provide a little bit better for your family, get a decent roof over their head and send them to a good school, that's considered a good thing.

No person can maximize the American Dream on the minimum wage.

If achieving the Hong Kong dream becomes a vanishing hope, then our society will suffer. What would the Hong Kong dream be? It's no different from the American dream, whereby an everyday man on the street who works hard would be able to make good savings and use those savings as equity for their future small business.

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.'

The American Dream may be slipping away. We have overcome such challenges before. To recover the Dream requires knowing where it came from, how it lasted so long and why it matters so much.

I lived through a golden period where society felt that it was good to help people who didn't have a great deal of money fulfil their potential.

I don't mind the rich getting richer, but the poor shouldn't be getting poorer, and there should be more people moving into the middle class.

We continue to recognize the greater ability of some to earn more than others. But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him a proper security is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power.

People naturally long for a bit of the wealth that is whorling all around them, and if the work and education available to them won't get them closer to the comforts that they see others enjoying, the temptation to take shortcuts can be fierce.

In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.

The American dream seems to be thriving in Europe not at home.

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.