Socioeconomic Mobility Quotes

The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.

You had a flood of immigrants, millions of them, coming to this country. What brought them here? It was the hope for a better life for them and their children. And, in the main, they succeeded. It is hard to find any century in history, in which so large a number of people experience so great an improvement in the conditions of their life, in the opportunities open to them, as in the period of the 19th and early 20th century.

Until economic freedom is attained for everybody, there can be no real freedom for anybody.

My mother only had a third grade education, was illiterate, worked as a domestic 2 to 3 jobs at a time, because she didn't want to be on welfare, because she never saw people who went on welfare come off of welfare, and she just didn't want to have her life controlled in that fashion.

I am a small man who wants to do big things for small people.

The estate taxes, on balance, are good. They get people to give money to charity, and they prevent these family dynasties which keep other people from having opportunities. It may be good for a family, but for society it's probably not good. And I've always been in favor of having an estate tax.

Capitalism with near-full employment was an impressive spectacle. But a growth in wealth is not at all the same thing as reducing poverty. A universal paean was raised in praise of growth. Growth was going to solve all problems. No need to bother about poverty. Growth will lift up the bottom and poverty will disappear without any need to pay attention to it. The economists, who should have known better, fell in with the same cry.

Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty.

There are but three ways for the populace to escape its wretched lot. The first two are by the routes of the wine-shop or the church; the third is by that of the social revolution.

I got elected on a commitment to Canadians that I was going to make growth work for everyone. I was going to focus on the middle class and those working hard to join it. I was going to make sure that the people who felt that the growth in the economy had left them behind would be included. That's similar to the promise that got Trump elected. Now, our approaches to the same problems are somewhat different. But in my conversations with him, we've very much been able to agree that we want to help the citizens of our countries in tangible ways.

My mission is to raise incomes for hard working middle class families. If you work hard and do your part you should be able to get ahead and stay ahead.

Workers in decent jobs view the economy as unjust if they or their children have virtually no chance of climbing to a higher rung in the socioeconomic ladder.

The truth is that I've always been fascinated with wealth in America. To me, it's been about the American dream and the corruption of that dream.

I feel like I have so many amazing opportunities because of my immigrant mother, my immigrant grandparents.

When you get a mobile phone it is almost like having a card to get you out of poverty in a couple of years.

I will do everything that I can to make sure that you have good jobs, with rising incomes, that your kids have good educations from preschool through college.

As the youngest child of a single immigrant mother with a third-grade education, I never thought in my wildest dreams that I'd ever be an elected official.

But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution.

My father passed away a few days before my election. This man, an African American born to a poor single mother in 1936 in the South, would worry in the last years of his life that he had better life chances when he was growing up than a young man born in the same circumstances would have today.

Education makes human beings more articulate. It transforms people. You can think differently about the world. It makes it possible for you to get jobs. It makes a dramatic difference. It generates a social equity that we need.

In the neighborhood where I grew up, it was a rough neighborhood - well, not rough, but it certainly wasn't upper class or anything. But I remember hearing things like, 'The little man just can't get ahead.' And if you start to believe that, then you know what? You don't get ahead.

I think every parent, every generation has wanted their children to do better and have a higher standard of living. But I think there's too much guilt.

Corruption has also proved difficult to root out because it is not simply a matter of the powerful preying on the weak.… graft and fraud can offer ways for a poor person to climb the socioeconomic ladder.

If you had looked at my life when I was 14 years old and said, 'Well, what's going to happen to this kid?' you would have concluded that I would have struggled with what academics call upward mobility.