What They Said About the Great American Dream

Image: Corbis

My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.
Abraham Lincoln

I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realisation the American dream–a dream yet unfulfilled.
Martin Luther King Jr

Kill my boss? Do I dare live out the American dream?
Homer Simpson

I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.
Bruce Springsteen

The American dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: The Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
JG Ballard

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
John Steinbeck

We must stop talking about the American dream and start listening to the dreams of Americans.
Max Beerbohm

Barack Obama was not born into wealth or privilege, yet today he is president of these United States of America. Barack Obama has lived the American dream. He has walked in our shoes.
Ken Salazar

The rich get richer and the poor get—children.
F Scott Fitzgerald

I refuse to be part of a generation that celebrates the death of communism abroad with the loss of the American dream at home.
Bill Clinton