Quotes & Sayings About Wealth And The American Dream

Our dreams are a window into our theology. We are a proud people, the inheritors of the American Dream - the pursuit of happiness is our inalienable right. Like bratty, self-involved little kids, we push past the Giver to grab for the gift. Can you see it? We use God for health, wealth, and emotional well-being, and in the process, we miss out on relationship with our heavenly Father. — Tullian Tchividjian

At the root of everything that we're trying to accomplish is the belief that America has a mission. We are a nation of freedom, living under God, believing all citizens must have the opportunity to grow, create wealth, and build a better life for those who follow. If we live up to those moral values, we can keep the American dream alive for our children and our grandchildren, and America will remain mankind's best hope. — Ronald Reagan

The original American dream wasn't about wealth, but freedom - freedom to worship and freedom from tyranny. It was also about partnering with God to release the light of His word to all nations, and exporting His glorious gospel to the ends of the earth. — Dutch Sheets

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. — Leonardo DiCaprio

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. — Ken Salazar

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

The American Dream became America's god; wealth and abundance have become the measure of America's success. But - as recent events have shown - we have been living an illusion. — Billy Graham

both of my grandparents had an almost religious faith in hard work and the American Dream. Neither was under any illusions that wealth or privilege didn't matter in America. On politics, for example, Mamaw had one opinion - "They're all a bunch of crooks" - but Papaw became a committed Democrat. He had no problem with Armco, but he and everyone like him hated the coal companies in Kentucky thanks to a long history of labor strife. So, to Papaw and Mamaw, not all rich people were bad, but all bad people were rich. Papaw was a Democrat because that party protected the working people. — J.D. Vance

We must understand what our idea of wealth is. Is it just about more buildings, more machines, more cars, more of everything? More and more is death. In the most affluent societies in the world, for example in the United States of America, a significant percentage of the population is on anti-depressants on a regular basis. If you just withdraw one particular medication from the market, almost half the nation will go crazy. That is not wellbeing. Generally, an American citizen has everything that anyone would dream of. — Jaggi Vasudev

We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him. — Ronald Reagan

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. — George Monbiot

The America of Obama's dreams is not the one of self-reliance and entrepreneurship to which he paid phony lip service at the beginning of his speech. It is an America in which the government, rather than the private sector, creates wealth and leads ignorant, helpless people by the nose from cradle to grave, from preschool to the academy, with the caveat that if they succeed too much, they will make themselves enemies of the state and targets for punitive action. Obama's new American dreams is an American nightmare. — David Limbaugh

That's why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it. — George Carlin

It was in 1931 that the historian James Truslow Adams coined the phrase "the American dream."
The American dream is not just a yearning for affluence, Adams said, but also for the chance to overcome barriers and social class, to become the best that we can be. Adams acknowledged that the United States didn't fully live up to that ideal, but he argued that America came closer than anywhere else. — Nicholas D. Kristof

In the wake of World War II, most Democrats and liberals claimed that if justice could be done and was not, only evil intent could explain the inaction. Most Republicans and conservatives replied scornfully that the vagabonds were simply calling yet again for an equal share of wealth that others had earned. Most moderates, both Democrats and Republicans, admitted that more justice demanded to be done, but they warned that equality, absent the striving and competition that had always characterized American life, might be an attractive dream, but it was not "the" American Dream.
Pursuing the American Dream, 7, 196 — Calvin C. Jillson

America does not seem to remember that it derived its wealth, its values, its food, much of its medicine, and a large part of its "dream" from Native Americans. — Paula Gunn Allen

The death tax punishes the American dream - making it virtually impossible for the average American family to build wealth across generations. — Kit Bond

I believe it is time for Americans to re-adopt a simpler and healthier American dream, a dream in which we seek financial stability rather than wealth creation. But — Erik Wecks