Quotes & Sayings About Upward Mobility

The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

The core principle is that we want an economy that works for everyone, not just for a small elite. We want equal opportunity, not equality of outcome. We want to make sure that there's upward mobility again, in our society and in our economy. — Robert Reich

I consider myself fortunate to have grown up in Brooklyn. It's what gave me my drive to succeed, the upward mobility I've been after my whole life. — Ian Schrager

The truth is, the liberal policies of the elite class have done little to improve the lot of those who depend so much on them. In America's black communities, where the goodies have been flowing for decades, rather than seeing improvements in terms of upward mobility, we are seeing deteriorating family structure, increases in violent crimes, growing poverty, and growing dependence. Even with such a blatant record of failure, there is slavish devotion to the elite class who continue to promise more goodies in exchange for votes. — Benjamin Carson

The data show we can do something about upward mobility. Every extra year of childhood spent in a better neighborhood seems to matter. — Raj Chetty

Let there be no mistake, Sen Sanders, his campaign and the vigorous debate that we've had about how to raise incomes, how to reduce inequality, increase upward mobility, has been very good for the Democratic Party and for America. — Hillary Clinton

A free economy and strong communities honor the dignity of every person, rewarding effort with justice, promoting upward mobility, and building solidarity among citizens. — Paul Ryan

My mother's family is Christian: her father was a Baptist lay preacher, and her brother, in a leap of Anglican upward mobility, became a vicar in the Church of Wales. But my mother converted to Islam on marrying my father. She was not obliged to; Muslim men are free to marry ahl al-kitab, or people of the Book - among them, Jews and Christians. — Shereen El Feki

History, in other words, provides little indication, let alone assurance, that political success is a prerequisite of upward mobility. — Jason L. Riley

Looking at and 'appreciating' art has been understood as an instrument (or at best a result) of upward mobility, in which owning art is the ultimate step. making art is at the bottom of the scale. This is the only legitimate reason to see artists as so many artists see themselves - as 'workers'. At the same time, artists/makers tend to feel misunderstood and, as creators, innately superior to the buyers/owners. The innermost circle of the art-world class system thereby replaces the rulers with the creators, and the contemporary artist in the big city is a schizophrenic creature. S/he is persistently working 'up' to be accepted, not only by other artists, but also by the hierarchy that exhibits, writes about and buys his / her work. At the same time s/he is often ideologically working 'down' in an attempt to identify with the workers outside of the art context and to overthrow the rulers in the name of art. — Ben Davis

Only three routes of upward mobility were available to socially ambitious upstarts such as Columbus: war, the Church, and the sea. Columbus probably contemplated all three: he wanted a clerical career for one of his brothers, and fancied himself as "a captain of cavaliers and conquests." But seafaring was a natural choice, especially for a boy from a maritime community as single-minded as that of Genoa. Opportunities for employment and profit abounded. — Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

We do know that working-class Americans aren't just less likely to climb the economic ladder, they're also more likely to fall off even after they've reached the top. I imagine that the discomfort they feel at leaving behind much of their identity plays at least a small role in this problem. One way our upper class can promote upward mobility, then, is not only by pushing wise public policies but by opening their hearts and minds to the newcomers who don't quite belong. Though — J.D. Vance

So there is more to their stance than a wistful yearning for acceptance in a world they never made. Their real motivation is an instinctive certainty as to what the score really is. They are out of the ballgame and they know it. Unlike the campus rebels, who with a minimum amount of effort will emerge from their struggle with a validated ticket to status, the outlaw motorcyclist views the future with the baleful eye of a man with no upward mobility at all. In a world increasingly geared to specialists, technicians and fantastically complicated machinery, the Hell's Angels are obvious losers and it bugs them. But instead of submitting quietly to their collective fate, they have made it the basis of a full-time social vendetta. They don't expect to win anything, but on the other hand, they have nothing to lose. If — Hunter S. Thompson

If you knew the upward mobility that South Dakota's kids have gotten from the opportunity to intern and to work and to be employed and to have upward mobility in that company and move on, it's been phenomenal for South Dakota. — Bill Janklow

Saying sorry too much is an anchor on your upward mobility. — Aimee Cohen

The term Hispanic, coined by technomarketing experts and by the designers of political campaigns, homogenizes our cultural diversity (Chicanos, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans become indistinguishable), avoids our indigenous cultural heritage and links us directly with Spain. Worse yet, it possesses connotations of upward mobility and political obedience. — Guillermo Gomez-Pena

We believe that the government has an important role to create the conditions that promote entrepreneurship, upward mobility, and individual responsibility. — Paul Ryan

Americans are better off in a dynamic, free-enterprise-based economy that fosters economic growth, opportunity and upward mobility instead of a stagnant, government-directed economy that stifles job creation and fosters government dependency. — Paul Ryan

Nowhere was the complacency of the establishment, with its blind faith in progress, more evident than in its attitude toward an elite degree: as long as my child goes to the right schools, upward mobility will continue. A university education had become the equivalent of a very expensive insurance policy, like owning a gun. — George Packer

We live in a country [USA] where the belief is that anyone can succeed, but for so many here, and for the majority of the world, that's not the case. In many parts of the world, women and poor people are at a huge disadvantage - certain rights and protections don't exist, and they don't have the chance of upward mobility. — Joy Bryant

But as I pursued that dream of upward mobility preparing for college, things just didn't fit together. As I read Scriptures about how the last will be first, I started wondering why I was working so hard to be first. — Shane Claiborne

We must promote upward mobility, starting with solutions that speak to our broken education system, broken immigration policy, and broken safety-net programs that foster dependency instead of helping people get back on their feet. — Paul Ryan

The Republicans did not set out to establish a strong national state or to facilitate the industrial revolution. They believed strongly in the American dream of hard work and upward mobility. They saw no contradiction between capital and labor, between wealth accumulation and equality. Even in the exigencies of war, they directed their legislation to their political base, the farmers and the small-town merchants. Their vision assumed the virtue of rural and small-town America. The majority of Republicans who enacted the legislation grew up on farms. Yet they created an industrial juggernaut that flung railroads across the continent and grew great cities from seaboard to seaboard that attracted thousands from those small towns and farms. These results must be counted among the most sterling examples of unintended consequences in American history.18 — David R. Goldfield

One chronicler writes of an area of India during the end of the 20th century: Almost no-one in this slum was poor by Indian benchmarks. ... True, a few residents trapped rats and frogs and fried them for dinner. A few ate the scrub grass at the sewage lake edge. And these individuals, miserable souls, thereby made an inestimable contribution to their neighbors. They gave those slum dwellers who didn't fry rats and eat weeds a sense of their upward mobility. — Katherine Boo

The way of Jesus is radically different. It is the way not of upward mobility but of downward mobility. It is going to the bottom, staying behind the sets and choosing the last place! Why is the way of Jesus worth choosing? Because it is the way to the Kingdom, the way Jesus took, and the way that brings everlasting life. — Henri Nouwen

The problem, gentlemen, is that Obama is right: The promise of upward mobility is dying in America, and no amount of political demagoguery will fix it. — Ron Fournier

Obama's perverse view of fairness threatens to create reverse incentives, militating against growth, jobs, expansion and upward mobility. — Dick Morris

To get back to the kind of shared prosperity and upward mobility we once considered normal will require another era of fundamental reform, of both our economy and our democracy. — Robert Reich

We're seeing an enormous amount of global upward mobility that's quite rapid and quite sudden, and undiscovered individuals have a chance - using the Internet, using computers - to prove themselves very quickly. So I think the mobility story will be a quite complicated one. — Tyler Cowen

There is a myth that the purpose of education is to give one the means for upward mobility and success. The plain truth is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does need desperately more peacemakers, healers, restorers, story tellers, and lovers of every shape and form. — David W. Orr

Obama does not believe in individual upward mobility. He would penalize it, tax it, regulate it, inveigh against it and disincentivize it. We will be like salmon swimming upstream to mate. We will overcome the currents, the waterfall, the rocks and the predators, and will grapple our way up the stream. Then, at the top of the waterfall will stand Obama the Bear, waiting to scoop us up and have us for dinner. The taxman cometh. — Dick Morris

We are a nation of immigrants, a quilt of many colors, and we've managed over more than two centuries to create a way of life that allows for a reasonable degree of upward mobility, that prizes individual liberty, promotes freedom of religion and genuinely values equal rights for all citizens. — Jay Parini

In all advanced industrial societies, education has become the single most important vehicle of upward mobility. — Peter L. Berger

If we are serious about providing upward mobility and building a skilled workforce, pre-school is the place to begin. — Madeleine M. Kunin

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. — Madeleine M. Kunin

I was brought up in a very naval, military, and conservative background. My father and his friends had very typical opinions of the British middle class - lower-middle class actually - after the war. My father broke into the middle class by joining the navy. I was the first member of my family ever to go to private school or even to university. So, the armed forces had been upward mobility for him. — Christopher Hitchens

One great worker equals three not-so-great workers, so it's worth paying terrific people not just for today but to find people that we think have upward mobility to become tomorrow's leaders. — Danny Meyer

America being behind France in upward mobility is a little bit like France being behind America in Croissants and Afternoon Sex. — Arianna Huffington

The stress laid on upward social mobility in the United States has tended to obscure the fact that there can be more than one kind of mobility and more than one direction in which it can go. There can be ethical mobility as well as financial, and it can go down as well as up. — Margaret Halsey

If this book accomplishes anything it will be to have exposed a number of myths about the American dream, to have disabused readers of the notion that upward mobility is a function of the founders' ingenious plan, or that Jacksonian democracy was liberating, or that the Confederacy was about states' rights rather than preserving class and racial distinctions. — Nancy Isenberg

In a world of upward mobility, choose downward servility. — Max Lucado

To 'know your place' is a good idea in politics. That is not to say 'stay in your place' or 'hang on to your place', because ambition or boredom may dictate upward or downward mobility, but a sense of place - a feel for one's own position in the control room-is useful in gauging what you should try to do. — William Safire

The child of the lower or lower middle class is urged in both overt and subtle ways to surpass his background, his well-meaning parents and friends never anticipating that if their dream of upward mobility is realized, the child may adopt the prejudices of the class to which he's lifted and, with a touch of neurotic distress, may permanently scorn his former life and also, to a certain extent, himself, since the class he's invaded is unlikely to accept him fully. — John Gardner

The measure of self-motivation in a young person will become the best way to predict upward mobility. — Tyler Cowen

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. — David Frum

Instead, power went to those who made things happen: businessmen and local magistrates. Over time, human nature being what it is, these men would create a kind of nobility, sometimes even buying titles from cash-poor foreigners, but this in itself underscores the point. Upward mobility was part of the Dutch character: if you worked hard and were smart, you rose in stature. Today that is a byword of a healthy society; in the seventeenth century it was weird. — Russell Shorto

Apprenticeships are a particularly effective way to create career pathways with upward mobility and strong earning potential. Because apprentices receive a paycheck, it's a great option for those with families to support, including many veterans. — Thomas Perez

My story is the story of many postwar British families. Upward mobility. A council house and then new affluence. — Sarah Waters