[Referring to John Bright:] He is a self made man, and worships his creator.
1st Earl of Beaconsfield
He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.
Back when Donald Trump was just starting in the primaries, and I was asked, 'What do you think of Trump?' I would say, 'Donald Trump is a great example of someone in our country being able to truly do anything. You can dream, you can do it. And that's a great example of that. But when the primaries are over, Donald Trump will be gone.'
Barack Obama was not born into wealth or privilege, yet today his is president of these United States of America. Barack Obama has lived the American Dream. He has walked in our shoes.
Yes, we worship the idea of the "self-made man" - otherwise we'd go on strike against Bill Gates having all that money! We worship that idea.
My mother was a full-time mom, and Dad started his own business. He was a mini-American dream story. Came from Russia at age 4, started his own pen business in Brooklyn. The company isn't around now, but he created his own healthy little world, leaving a decent legacy. My dad taught at Cooper Union but was never fully graduated himself.
Judge Thomas was a man who had used the system to get where he wanted to be, but then felt that everyone else should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
Henry Wellcome certainly was a talented character with a colorful and amazing personal story.
My fellow Americans, this is an amazing moment for me. To think that a once-scrawny boy from Austria could grow up to become governor of the state of California and then stand here... then stand here in Madison Square Garden and speak on behalf of the president of the United States - that is an immigrant's dream. It is the American dream.
Gerald Boyd was a classic specimen of the self-made man. Born poor, he worked and studied his way up out of poverty under the guidance of his widowed grandmother.
What, after all, is the narrative of 'the American Dream?' It was a discourse formulated between the 1880s and the 1920s in the United States during the great waves of migration and expansion and reforms of the Progressive Era.
I've always loved Houdini, not just because of what he did, but also because of what he stood for. He was a self-made man in a time when the idea of celebrity was still new, and he used his celebrity for good.
When did it something of shame or ridicule to be a self-made man in America?
The American culture ideal of the "self-made-man," of everyone "standing on his own feet" seemed as tragic a picture as the initiative-destroying dependence on a benevolent despot. He felt and perceived clearly that we all need continuous help from each other, and that this type of interdependence is the greatest challenge to maturity of individual and group functioning.
Is any man skillful enough to have fashioned himself?
A man who raises himself by degrees to wealth and power, contracts, in the course of this protracted labor, habits of prudence and restraint which he cannot afterwards shake off. A man cannot gradually enlarge his mind as he does his house.
Harris had the egotistical dogmatism of the self-made man who had painfully educated himself without contact with superior brains.
My father started with nothing and is a self-made man. No matter what I do with my life, I can never match his accomplishments.
There are few people who exemplify the ideals of opportunity, entrepreneurship and commitment to the collective good than the great New Yorker and the face of the $10 bill, Alexander Hamilton.
My father bought three ramshackle houses, rebuilt them, rented them out, kept clawing his way up the ladder. A man with a third grade education from the south.
Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.
Vince McMahon is an intimidating individual because of the amount of respect he commands because of what he's done for entertainment, turning the business into a billion dollar success story. He rarely sleeps. He's a workaholic. He's passionate. He loves what he does.
It is funny because the guy who is my boss now, Howard Stern, has a similarity there. He got big being a regular guy. He wasn't the greatest looking guy in the world.
The most famous self-made man in the world today is our own Edison. Talk with Mr. Edison and he will tell you he owes much if not most of his success to omnivorous reading. Forbes is one of his favorite publications. How closely he reads it can be gathered from a letter just received from him in which he asks the editor to forward a long analytical letter to the writer of a series of articles which contained two figures Mr. Edison questions, and he wants to know exactly on what authority or investigation they were based. Both letters were the product of Mr. Edison and were signed by him.
Lincoln is such an iconic figure in American history. He seems to reflect so many elements of American culture that we consider essential, whether it's the self-made man, the frontier hero, the politician who tries to act in a moral way as well as in a political way, Honest Abe. His career raises these questions that are still with us, the power of the federal government vis-à-vis the states, the question of race in American life, can we be a society of equals? There are so many issues central to Lincoln's career that are still part of our society one hundred and fifty years later.
