Achieving The American Dream Quotes

Those who achieve the extraordinary are usually the most ordinary because they have nothing to prove to anybody. Be Humble.

But I also realize that winning doesn't always mean getting first place; it means getting the best out of yourself.

The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

In a society in which the dream of success has been drained of any meaning beyond itself, men have nothing against which to measure their achievements except the achievements of others.

But I also realize that winning doesn't always mean getting first place; it means getting the best out of yourself. One of my greatest joys is inspiring other people to perform at their best.

Among men who rise to fame and leadership two types are recognizable-those who are born with a belief in themselves and those in whom it is a slow growth dependent on actual achievement. To men of the last type their own success is a constant surprise, and its fruits the more delicious, yet to be tested cautiously with a haunting sense of doubt whether it is not all a dream. In that doubt lies true modesty, not the sham of insincere self-depreciation but the modesty of "moderation," in the Greek sense. It

A Disavowal of the pursuit of Middleclassness', the heading read. While it is permissible to chase ‘middleincomeness’ with all our might, the text stated, those blessed with the talent or good fortune to achieve success in the American mainstream must avoid the psychological entrapment of Black ‘middleclassness’ that hypnotizes the successful brother or sister into believing they are better than the rest and teaches them to think in terms of ‘we’ and ‘they’ instead of 'US'!

The American Dream betrayed even those who achieved it, lonely in their overtime careers and their McMansions, narcotized to the ongoing ruination of nature and culture but aching because of it, endlessly consuming and accumulating to quell the insistent voice: “I wasn’t put here on Earth to sell a product.” “I wasn’t put here on Earth to increase market share.” “I wasn’t put here on Earth to make numbers grow.” We protest not only at our exclusion from the American Dream; we protest at its bleakness. If it cannot include everyone on Earth, every ecosystem and bioregion, every people and culture in its richness; if the wealth of one must be the debt of another; if it entails sweatshops and underclasses and fracking and all the rest of the ugliness our system has created, then we want none of it. No one deserves to live in a world built upon the degradation of human beings, forests, waters, and the rest of our living planet. Speaking to our brethren on Wall Street: No one deserves to spend their lives playing with numbers while the world burns.

I've never felt that the American Dream was owed to me. I never felt that I was entitled to this Dream. This is why I laid the cobblestone before me for this Dream to be achieved.

In fact, studies show that less than 1 percent of Americans write down specific goals for themselves each year. That's a shame, because writing down your goals is powerful.

Schools themselves aren't creating the opportunity gap: the gap is already large by the time children enter kindergarten and does not grow as children progress through school. The gaps in cognitive achievement by level of maternal education that we observe at age 18-powerful predictors of who goes to college and who does not - are mostly present at age 6when children enter school. Schooling plays only a minor role in alleviating or creating test score gaps.

For all the talk about the need to be a likable "team player," many people work in a fairly cutthroat environment that would seem to be especially challenging to those who possess the recommended traits. Cheerfulness, upbeatness, and compliance: these are the qualities of subordinates -- of servants rather than masters, women (traditionally, anyway) rather than men. After advising his readers to overcome the bitterness and negativity engendered by frequent job loss and to achieve a perpetually sunny outlook, management guru Harvey Mackay notes cryptically that "the nicest, most loyal, and most submissive employees are often the easiest people to fire." Given the turmoil in the corporate world, the prescriptions of niceness ring of lambs-to-the-slaughter.

what counted was helping her father achieve his dream-and finding interesting stuff to put in her blog.

social justice” in practice is just a rationale for the taking of one person’s achievements, and giving them to others who are favored by the party in power.

The United States is a land that, if you work hard and keep your dream alive, you may or may not achieve it. However, if you cheat, lie, manipulate, and bribe, you will definitely succeed.

If a tiny boy, birthed from the poverty of the projects and a crack-addicted mother, can make it from a foster house to the White House, then the American Dream is real and achievable for everyone.

New Rule: Americans must realize what makes NFL football so great: socialism. That's right, the NFL takes money from the rich teams and gives it to the poorer one...just like President Obama wants to do with his secret army of ACORN volunteers. Green Bay, Wisconsin, has a population of one hundred thousand. Yet this sleepy little town on the banks of the Fuck-if-I-know River has just as much of a chance of making it to the Super Bowl as the New York Jets--who next year need to just shut the hell up and play. Now, me personally, I haven't watched a Super Bowl since 2004, when Janet Jackson's nipple popped out during halftime. and that split-second glimpse of an unrestrained black titty burned by eyes and offended me as a Christian. But I get it--who doesn't love the spectacle of juiced-up millionaires giving one another brain damage on a giant flatscreen TV with a picture so real it feels like Ben Roethlisberger is in your living room, grabbing your sister? It's no surprise that some one hundred million Americans will watch the Super Bowl--that's forty million more than go to church on Christmas--suck on that, Jesus! It's also eighty-five million more than watched the last game of the World Series, and in that is an economic lesson for America. Because football is built on an economic model of fairness and opportunity, and baseball is built on a model where the rich almost always win and the poor usually have no chance. The World Series is like The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. You have to be a rich bitch just to play. The Super Bowl is like Tila Tequila. Anyone can get in. Or to put it another way, football is more like the Democratic philosophy. Democrats don't want to eliminate capitalism or competition, but they'd like it if some kids didn't have to go to a crummy school in a rotten neighborhood while others get to go to a great school and their dad gets them into Harvard. Because when that happens, "achieving the American dream" is easy for some and just a fantasy for others. That's why the NFL literally shares the wealth--TV is their biggest source of revenue, and they put all of it in a big commie pot and split it thirty-two ways. Because they don't want anyone to fall too far behind. That's why the team that wins the Super Bowl picks last in the next draft. Or what the Republicans would call "punishing success." Baseball, on the other hand, is exactly like the Republicans, and I don't just mean it's incredibly boring. I mean their economic theory is every man for himself. The small-market Pittsburgh Steelers go to the Super Bowl more than anybody--but the Pittsburgh Pirates? Levi Johnston has sperm that will not grow and live long enough to see the Pirates in a World Series. Their payroll is $40 million; the Yankees' is $206 million. The Pirates have about as much chance as getting in the playoffs as a poor black teenager from Newark has of becoming the CEO of Halliburton. So you kind of have to laugh--the same angry white males who hate Obama because he's "redistributing wealth" just love football, a sport that succeeds economically because it does just that. To them, the NFL is as American as hot dogs, Chevrolet, apple pie, and a second, giant helping of apple pie.

Johnson saw preoccupation with principle and procedure as a sign of impotence. Such men were “troublemakers,” more concerned with appearing forceful than in exercising the real strengths that led to tangible achievement.

America wasn’t its people,” said Murka, stepping toe-to-toe with Herbert. He was a good sight taller than the hulking mass of bulletproof steel standing in front of him. “America was a dream, son. A dream of what we could be. That any person, regardless of their birth, could rise above it all and achieve greatness. It was a dream that even the most lowly of us could stand up, fight, and even die for, if only to protect someone else’s chances for that greatness.

White supremacists boast about white americans being superior. Let's look at it reasonably, shall we - not that you can reason with fanatics! Most of the third world speaks two or three languages, yet you say, white americans are superior! Dreamers from the third world bear ten times more difficulty to achieve their dream, yet you say, white americans are superior! Humankind's earliest scientific achievements came not from the West, but from the East and the Middle East, yet you say, America is superior - a juvenile country whose very existence is rooted in humankind's worst of atrocities. Well done! You really are superior - in cooking up fiction. The fact of the matter is, excellence has no race. And the only inferior people on earth are the ones who think of others as such.

It is only after a person surrenders achieving “The American Dream,” and annihilates any personal thought of living exclusively for material gain that a person commences a journey worthy of a spiritual warrior, a glorious destiny of self-realization in lieu of pursing the opulence of a gilded life.

Stressful conditions from outside school are much more likely to intrude into the classroom in high poverty schools. Every one of ten stressors is two to three times more common in high poverty schools-- Student hunger, unstable housing, lack of medical and dental care, caring for family members, immigration issues, community violence and safety issues.

Ireland, like Ukraine, is a largely rural country which suffers from its proximity to a more powerful industrialised neighbour. Ireland’s contribution to the history of tractors is the genius engineer Harry Ferguson, who was born in 1884, near Belfast. Ferguson was a clever and mischievous man, who also had a passion for aviation. It is said that he was the first man in Great Britain to build and fly his own aircraft in 1909. But he soon came to believe that improving efficiency of food production would be his unique service to mankind. Harry Ferguson’s first two-furrow plough was attached to the chassis of the Ford Model T car converted into a tractor, aptly named Eros. This plough was mounted on the rear of the tractor, and through ingenious use of balance springs it could be raised or lowered by the driver using a lever beside his seat. Ford, meanwhile, was developing its own tractors. The Ferguson design was more advanced, and made use of hydraulic linkage, but Ferguson knew that despite his engineering genius, he could not achieve his dream on his own. He needed a larger company to produce his design. So he made an informal agreement with Henry Ford, sealed only by a handshake. This Ford-Ferguson partnership gave to the world a new type of Fordson tractor far superior to any that had been known before, and the precursor of all modern-type tractors. However, this agreement by a handshake collapsed in 1947 when Henry Ford II took over the empire of his father, and started to produce a new Ford 8N tractor, using the Ferguson system. Ferguson’s open and cheerful nature was no match for the ruthless mentality of the American businessman. The matter was decided in court in 1951. Ferguson claimed $240 million, but was awarded only $9.25 million. Undaunted in spirit, Ferguson had a new idea. He approached the Standard Motor Company at Coventry with a plan, to adapt the Vanguard car for use as tractor. But this design had to be modified, because petrol was still rationed in the post-war period. The biggest challenge for Ferguson was the move from petrol-driven to diesel-driven engines and his success gave rise to the famous TE-20, of which more than half a million were built in the UK. Ferguson will be remembered for bringing together two great engineering stories of our time, the tractor and the family car, agriculture and transport, both of which have contributed so richly to the well-being of mankind.

The United States is utopia embodied. You should not judge their crisis in the same way as we judge ours – the crisis of the old European countries. We have a crisis of historical ideals caused by the impossibility of realizing them. They have a crisis of a realized utopia as a consequence of its duration and continuity. The idyllic conviction of Americans that they are the center of the world, a higher power and an absolute role model is not such a delusion. It is based not so much on technological resources and military forces as on a miraculous belief in the existence of an embodied utopia – a society that, with what it may seem unbearable innocence, is based on the idea that it has achieved everything that others only dreamed of: justice, abundance, rights, wealth, freedom; America knows it, it believes it, and in the end, others also believe it.

Together the five orbiters Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour have flown a total of 133 successful missions, an unequaled accomplishment of engineering, management, and political savvy. But it's the two disasters that people remember, that most shape the shuttle's story. The lovely dream of spaceflight I grew up with is marred by the images of Challenger and Columbia breaking apart in the sky, the lost astronauts smiling on hopefully in their portraits, oblivious. Some people took the disasters to mean the entire space program had been a lie, that the dream itself was tainted with our fallibility. But even as a child, I knew it was more complex than that. If we want to see people take risks, we have to be prepared to sometimes see them fail. The story of American spaceflight is a story with many endings, a story of how we have weighed our achievements against our failures.

In America, organized athletics teach militarism, authoritarianism , racism, and sexism, thereby perpetuating the "false consciousness" of the masses. Sports serve as an "opiate" of the people, diverting the masses from their real problems with a "dream world" of glamour and excitement. They promote sexual -rivalry among males-with "vestal virgins" leading the cheers from the sidelines-and thus prevent the proletariat from achieving revolutionary solidarity in the face of its oppressors.

Stories like Bukowski’s are the bread and butter of our cultural narrative. Bukowski’s life embodies the American Dream: a man fights for what he wants, never gives up, and eventually achieves his wildest dreams. It’s practically a movie waiting to happen. We all look at stories like Bukowski’s and say, “See? He never gave up. He never stopped trying. He always believed in himself. He persisted against all the odds and made something of himself!” It is then strange that on Bukowski’s tombstone, the epitaph reads: “Don’t try.

We have not thoroughly assessed the bodies snatched from dirt and sand to be chained in a cell. We have not reckoned with the horrendous, violent mass kidnapping that we call the Middle Passage. We have not been honest about all of America's complicity - about the wealth the South earned on the backs of the enslaved, or the wealth the North gained through the production of enslaved hands. We have not fully understood the status symbol that owning bodies offered. We have not confronted the humanity, the emotions, the heartbeats of the multiple generations who were born into slavery and died in it, who never tasted freedom on America's land. The same goes for the Civil War. We have refused to honestly confront the fact that so many were willing to die in order to hold the freedom of others in their hands. We have refused to acknowledge slavery's role at all, preferring to boil things down to the far more palatable "state's rights." We have not confessed that the end of slavery was so bitterly resented, the rise of Jim Crow became inevitable - and with it, a belief in Black inferiority that lives on in hearts and minds today. We have painted the hundred-year history of Jim Crow as little more than mean signage and the inconvenience that white people and Black people could not drink from the same fountain. But those signs weren't just "mean". They were perpetual reminders of the swift humiliation and brutal violence that could be suffered at any moment in the presence of whiteness. Jim Crow meant paying taxes for services one could not fully enjoy; working for meager wages; and owning nothing that couldn't be snatched away. For many black families, it meant never building wealth and never having legal recourse for injustice. The mob violence, the burned-down homes, the bombed churches and businesses, the Black bodies that were lynched every couple of days - Jim Crow was walking through life measuring every step. Even our celebrations of the Civil Rights Movement are sanitized, its victories accentuated while the battles are whitewashed. We have not come to grips with the spitting and shouting, the pulling and tugging, the clubs, dogs, bombs, and guns, the passion and vitriol with which the rights of Black Americans were fought against. We have not acknowledged the bloodshed that often preceded victory. We would rather focus on the beautiful words of Martin Luther King Jr. than on the terror he and protesters endured at marches, boycotts, and from behind jail doors. We don't want to acknowledge that for decades, whiteness fought against every civil right Black Americans sought - from sitting at lunch counters and in integrated classrooms to the right to vote and have a say in how our country was run. We like to pretend that all those white faces who carried protest signs and batons, who turned on their sprinklers and their fire hoses, who wrote against the demonstrations and preached against the changes, just disappeared. We like to pretend that they were won over, transformed, the moment King proclaimed, "I have a dream." We don't want to acknowledge that just as Black people who experienced Jim Crow are still alive, so are the white people who vehemently protected it - who drew red lines around Black neighborhoods and divested them of support given to average white citizens. We ignore that white people still avoid Black neighborhoods, still don't want their kids going to predominantly Black schools, still don't want to destroy segregation. The moment Black Americans achieved freedom from enslavement, America could have put to death the idea of Black inferiority. But whiteness was not prepared to sober up from the drunkenness of power over another people group. Whiteness was not ready to give up the ability to control, humiliate, or do violence to any Black body in the vicinity - all without consequence.

These cultural generalizations, perhaps correctly, reduce the history of immigration to a binary. When immigrants come into this country, whether they join the labor force, like the Irish, Mexicans, and Central Americans, or they become small-time entrepreneurs, oftentimes in Black neighborhoods. Regardless of their choice, their economic asesion will depend on their relationship with Black Americans. If you accept this analysis, Black people are the only race in America. Everyone else is either white or on their way to becoming white. The new Asians, much like the Jews and the Irish before them, will one day be white, and their dream of generic Americanness will be achieved.

In Europe my family left their toes, but to Ellis Island they brought a dream. The old American dream. Work hard, save your money, be decent, and success you're bound to have. A business of your own. A house. Nice food on the table, carpets, curtains. Maybe two weeks in December in Miami Beach. Only if you're my family you swim with your slippers on. Okay. I grew up with that dream. But these artists you're describing, the self-promoting crybabies what are intentionally being scholckmeisters and gonifs, they dream the new American dream. And the new one is to achieve wealth and recognition without having the burden of intelligence, talent, sacrifice, or the human values what are universal.

When blue-collar, white workers in middle America look at Donald Trump in his fill-fitting suit and baseball cap, with a physical image that is perhaps more like their own, they see a possibility that they could be him. Aside from his skin colour, Barack Obama, with his lean physique, good looks and charisma, hanging out with rock stars and movie stars, his life and what he stands for seems at a far remove. Except the reality is that he was raised without his father, cared for by his grandparents and moved around a lot as a child, meaning he has potentially much more in common with the Appalachian voters than Donald Trump. He lived and achieved the American Dream in arguably a more fundamental way than Trump did.

[M]ost Americans are still drawing some water from the Christian well. But a growing number are inventing their own versions of what Christianity means, abandoning the nuances of traditional theology in favor of religions that stroke their egos and indulge or even celebrate their worst impulses. . . . Both doubters and believers stand to lose if religion in the age of heresy turns out to be complicit in our fragmented communities, our collapsing families, our political polarization, and our weakened social ties. Both doubters and believers will inevitably suffer from a religious culture that supplies more moral license than moral correction, more self-satisfaction than self-examination, more comfort than chastisement. . . . Many of the overlapping crises in American life . . . can be traced to the impulse to emphasize one particular element of traditional Christianity—one insight, one doctrine, one teaching or tradition—at the expense of all the others. The goal is always progress: a belief system that’s simpler or more reasonable, more authentic or more up-to-date. Yet the results often vindicate the older Christian synthesis. Heresy sets out to be simpler and more appealing and more rational, but it often ends up being more extreme. . . . The boast of Christian orthodoxy . . . has always been its fidelity to the whole of Jesus. Its dogmas and definitions seek to encompass the seeming contradictions in the gospel narratives rather than evading them. . . . These [heretical] simplifications have usually required telling a somewhat different story about Jesus than the one told across the books of the New Testament. Sometimes this retelling has involved thinning out the Christian canon, eliminating tensions by subtracting them. . . . More often, though, it’s been achieved by straightforwardly rewriting or even inventing crucial portions of the New Testament account. . . . “Religious man was born to be saved,” [Philip Rieff] wrote, but “psychological man is born to be pleased.” . . . In 2005, . . . . Smith and Denton found no evidence of real secularization among their subjects: 97 percent of teenagers professed some sort of belief in the divine, 71 percent reported feeling either “very” or “somewhat” close to God, and the vast majority self-identified as Christian. There was no sign of deep alienation from their parents’ churches, no evidence that the teenagers in the survey were poised to convert outright to Buddhism or Islam, and no sign that real atheism was making deep inroads among the young. But neither was there any evidence of a recognizably orthodox Christian faith. “American Christianity,” Smith and Denton suggested, is “either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself,” or else is “actively being colonized and displaced by a quite different religious faith.” They continued: “Most religious teenagers either do not really comprehend what their own religious traditions say they are supposed to believe, or they do understand it and simply do not care to believe it.” . . . An ego that’s never wounded, never trammeled or traduced—and that’s taught to regard its deepest impulses as the promptings of the divine spirit—can easily turn out to be an ego that never learns sympathy, compassion, or real wisdom. And when contentment becomes an end unto itself, the way that human contents express themselves can look an awful lot like vanity and decadence. . . . For all their claims to ancient wisdom, there’s nothing remotely countercultural about the Tolles and Winfreys and Chopras. They’re telling an affluent, appetitive society exactly what it wants to hear: that all of its deepest desires are really God’s desires, and that He wouldn’t dream of judging. This message encourages us to justify our sins by spiritualizing them. . . . Our vaunted religiosity is real enough, but our ostensible Christian piety doesn’t have the consequences a casual observer might expect. . . . We nod to God, and then we do as we please.

In a society in which the dream of success has been drained of any meaning beyond itself, men have nothing against which to measure their achievements except the achievements of others. Self-approval depends on public recognition and acclaim, and the quality of this approval has undergone important changes in its own right. The good opinion of friends and neighbors, which formerly informed a man that he had lived a useful life, rested on appreciation of his accomplishments. Today men seek the kind of approval that applauds not their actions but their personal attributes. They wish to be not so much esteemed as admired. They crave not fame but the glamour and excitement of celebrity. They want to be envied rather than respected. Pride and acquisitiveness, the sins of an ascendant capitalism, have given way to vanity.

It was a tough journey, though, and I realize that some people don’t have the endurance, or the faith, to continue in the face of such great resistance. But not a day goes by when I don’t meet someone who’s also put it all on the line and is working their butt off to achieve their professional and personal dreams. Many millennials, in particular, are willing to take a chance and do something outside the box, without the “right” degree or experience or any guarantee of future success. They’re willing to start a business—a tech company, a nonprofit—with a couple of friends or alone in their apartment. They’ve rejected the narrative that most boomers lived by—that you should go to school, get a job, work for the same company for thirty years, trust that the company will take care of you after retirement with a pension and possibly stock options. They’ve rejected that narrative because it doesn’t exist anymore in most cases. Most of the millennials who expect that path are, in my opinion, the ones still living at home. Getting angry at “the man” for keeping them down. Waiting for someone else, the government most likely, to come in and save the day. These are the ones who reject or don’t take personal responsibility. Who get out of college, get their first job, and want to be the boss of the company the very same day. They’re twenty-five, have no experience beyond that one semester as an intern, but they want that corner office and $100K in year one.

Towards the end of the last century the pursuit of Utopia entered the political mainstream. In future only one kind of regime would be legitimate: American-style democratic capitalism – the final form of human government, as it was termed in the fleeting and now forgotten mood of hubris that followed the Soviet collapse. Led by the United States, western governments committed themselves to installing democracy throughout the world – an impossible dream that in many countries could only produce chaos. At the same time they launched a ‘war against terror’ that failed to distinguish between new threats and the normal conflicts of history. The Right was possessed by fantasies, and like the utopian visions of the last century – but far more quickly – its grandiose projects have crumbled into dust. In the twentieth century it seemed utopian movements could come to power only in dictatorial regimes. Yet after 9/ 11 utopian thinking came to shape foreign policy in the world’s pre-eminent democracy. In many ways the Bush administration behaved like a revolutionary regime. It was prepared to engage in pre-emptive attacks on sovereign states in order to achieve its goals, while at the same time it has been ready to erode long-established American freedoms. It established a concentration camp in Guantánamo whose inmates are beyond the reach of normal legal protection, denied the protection of habeas corpus to terrorist suspects, set up an apparatus of surveillance to monitor the population and authorized American officials to practise what in any other country would be defined as torture. Under the leadership of Tony Blair, Britain suffered, in a more limited way, a similar transformation.

While the overall systems of heterosexism and ableism are still with us, they have adapted in limited ways. These adaptations are held up as reassurance to those who fought long and hard for a particular change that equality has now been achieved. These milestones—such as the recognition of same-sex marriage, the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Title 9, the election of Barack Obama—are, of course, significant and worthy of celebration. But systems of oppression are deeply rooted and not overcome with the simple passage of legislation. Advances are also tenuous, as we can see in recent challenges to the rights of LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, and intersex) people. Systems of oppression are not completely inflexible. But they are far less flexible than popular ideology would acknowledge, and the collective impact of the inequitable distribution of resources continues across history. COLOR-BLIND RACISM What is termed color-blind racism is an example of racism’s ability to adapt to cultural changes.3 According to this ideology, if we pretend not to notice race, then there can be no racism. The idea is based on a line from the famous “I Have a Dream” speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963 during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. At the time of King’s speech, it was much more socially acceptable for white people to admit to their racial prejudices and belief in white racial superiority. But many white people had never witnessed the kind of violence to which blacks were subjected. Because the struggle for civil rights was televised, whites across the nation watched in horror as black men, women, and children were attacked by police dogs and fire hoses during peaceful protests and beaten and dragged away from lunch counters.

To achieve authentic, sustained happiness, above all else you need to be in charge of your life, to be in control of who you want to be, and be able to make the appropriate changes if you are not. This cannot merely be a perception, a slogan like the American Dream (the United States came way down on the LSE's social mobility scale, incidentally). In Scandinavia it is a reality. These are the real lands of opportunity. There is far greater social mobility in the Nordic countries than in the United States or Britain and, for all the collectivism and state interference in the lives of the people who live here, there is far greater freedom to be the person you want to be, and do the things you want to do, up here in the north. In a recent poll by Gallup, only 5 percent of Danes said they could not change their lives if they wanted to. In contrast, I can think of many American states in which it would probably be quite an uncomfortable experience to declare yourself an atheist, for example or gay, or to be married yet choose not to have children, or to be unmarried and have children, or to have an abortion, or to raise your children as Muslims. Less significantly, but still limiting, I don't imagine it would be easy being vegetarian in Texas, for instance, or a wine buff in Salt Lake City, come to that. And don't even think of coming out as a socialist anywhere! In Scandinavia you can be all of these things and no one will bat an eye (as long as you wait and cross on green). Crucial to this social mobility are the schools. The autonomy enabled by a high-quality, free education system is just as important as the region's economic equality and extensive welfare safety nets, if not more so. In Scandinavia the standard of education is not only the best in the world, but the opportunities it presents are available to all, free of charge. This is the bedrock of Nordic exceptionalism.

Gossip, even malicious rumors, are worth more than the most expensive publicity campaign in the world. What alarmed me most in the course of my stay in the United States was the habit of spending enormous sums of money in order to achieve so little real luxury. America represents the triumph of quantity over quality. Mass production triumphs; men and women both prefer to buy a multitude of mediocre things rather than a smaller number, carefully chosen. The American woman, faithful to the ideal of optimism with the United States seems to have made its rule of life, spends money entirely in order to gratify the collective need to buy. She prefers three new dresses to one beautiful one and does not linger over a choice, knowing perfectly well that her fancy will be of short duration and the dress which she is in the process of buying will be discarded very soon. The prime need of fashion is to please and attract. Consequently this attraction cannot be born of uniformity, the mother of boredom. Contemporary elegance is at once simple and natural. Since there is no patience where vanity is concerned, any client who is kept waiting considers it a personal insult. The best bargain in the world is a successful dress. It brings happiness to the woman who wears it and it is never too dear for the man who pays for it. The most expensive dress in the world is a dress which is a failure. It infuriates the woman who wears it and it is a burden to the man who pays for it. In addition, it practically always involves him in the purchase of a second dress much more expensive - the only thing that can blot out the memory of the first failure. Living in a house which does not suit you is like wearing someone else's clothes. There will always be women who cling to a particular style of dress because they wore it during the time of their greatest happiness, but white hair is the only excuse for this type of eccentricity. The need for display, which is dormant in all of us, can express itself nowadays in fashion and nowhere else. The dresses of this collection may be worn by only a few of the thousands of women who read and dream about them, but high fashion need not be directly accessible to everyone: it need only exist in the world for its influence to be felt.

Our democracy cannot survive its current downward drift into tribalism, extremism, and seething resentment. Today it’s “us versus them” in America. Politics is little more than blood sport. As a result, our willingness to believe the worst about everyone outside our own bubble is growing, and our ability to solve problems and seize opportunities is shrinking. We have to do better. We have honest differences. We need vigorous debates. Healthy skepticism is good. It saves us from being too naive or too cynical. But it is impossible to preserve democracy when the well of trust runs completely dry. The freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the checks and balances in our Constitution were designed to prevent the self-inflicted wounds we face today. But as our long history reveals, those written words must be applied by people charged with giving life to them in each new era. That’s how African Americans moved from being slaves to being equal under the law and how they set off on the long journey to be equal in fact, a journey we know is not over. The same story can be told of women’s rights, workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, the rights of the disabled, the struggle to define and protect religious liberty, and to guarantee equality to people without regard to their sexual orientation or gender identity. These have been hard-fought battles, waged on uncertain, shifting terrain. Each advance has sparked a strong reaction from those whose interests and beliefs are threatened. Today the changes are happening so fast, in an environment so covered in a blizzard of information and misinformation, that our very identities are being challenged. What does it mean to be an American today? It’s a question that will answer itself if we get back to what’s brought us this far: widening the circle of opportunity, deepening the meaning of freedom, and strengthening bonds of community. Shrinking the definition of them and expanding the definition of us. Leaving no one behind, left out, looked down on. We must get back to that mission. And do it with both energy and humility, knowing that our time is fleeting and our power is not an end in itself but a means to achieve more noble and necessary ends. The American dream works when our common humanity matters more than our interesting differences and when together they create endless possibilities. That’s an America worth fighting—even dying—for. And, more important, it’s an America worth living and working for.

Instead of a tax code that crushes innovation, that imposes burdens on families struggling to make ends met, imagine a simple flat tax that lets every American fill out his or her taxes on a postcard. Imagine abolishing the IRS. Instead of the lawlessness and the president’s unconstitutional executive amnesty, imagine a president that finally, finally, finally secures the borders. And imagine a legal immigration system that welcomes and celebrates those who come to achieve the American dream. Instead

To achieve the ultimate Confucian objective—a virtuous society—America has favored the rule of laws over Confucian-style virtues.

To achieve these Jeffersonian ends, Alexander Hamilton—Jefferson’s philosophical rival—devised an ingenious strategy that entailed a strong manufacturing base, a national banking system, a centralized federal government, and an export-led economic scheme protected by the U.S. Navy.

Empirical logic achieved a signal triumph in the Old Testament, where survivals from the early proto-logical stage are very few and far between. With it man reached a point where his best judgments about his relation to God, his fellow men and the world, were in most respects not appreciably inferior to ours. In fundamental ethical and spiritual matters we have not progressed at all beyond the empirico-logical world of the Old Testament or the unrivalled fusion of proto-logical intuition, 64 [see Coomaraswamy, Review of Religion, 1942, p. 138, paragraph 3] empirico-logical wisdom and logical deduction which we find in the New Testament. In fact a very large section of modern religion, literature and art actually represents a pronounced retrogression when compared with the Old Testament. For example, astrology, spiritism and kindred divagations, which have become religion to tens of millions of Europeans and Americans, are only the outgrowth of proto-logical interpretation of nature, fed by empirico-logical data and covered with a spurious shell of Aristotelian logic and scientific induction. Plastic and graphic art has swung violently away from logical perspective and perceptual accuracy, and has plunged into primordial depths of conceptual drawing and intuitive imagery. While it cannot be denied that this swing from classical art to conceptual and impressionistic art has yielded some valuable results, it is also true that it represents a very extreme retrogression into the proto-logical past. Much of the poetry, drama and fiction which has been written during the past half-century is also a reversion from classical and logical standards of morality and beauty into primitive savagery or pathological abnormality. Some of it has reached such paralogical levels of sophistication that it has lost all power to furnish any standards at all to a generation which has deliberately tried to abandon its entire heritage from the past. All systematic attempts to discredit inherited sexual morality, to substitute dream-states for reflection, and to replace logical writing by jargon, are retreats into the jungle from which man emerged through long and painful millennia of disillusionment. With the same brains and affective reactions as those which our ancestors possessed two thousand years ago, increasing sophistication has not been able to teach us any sounder fundamental principles of life than were known at that time. . . . Unless we can continue along the pathway of personal morality and spiritual growth which was marked out for civilized man by the founders of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, more than two thousand years ago, our superior skill in modifying and even in transforming the material world about us can lead only to repeated disasters, each more terrible than its predecessor. (Archaeology and the Religion of Israel, 5th Ed. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 31-33.)

I wondered if when we take Christian theology out of the context of its narrative, when we ignore the poetry in which it is presented, when we turn it into formulas to help us achieve the American dream, we lose its meaning entirely, and the ideas become fodder for the head but have no impact on the way we live our lives or think about God. This is, perhaps, why people are so hostile toward religion.

The original American dream--the one held by the seventeenth-century Puritan settlers--was religious: to establish liberty as the condition that allowed them to worship and to serve God as dictated by their consciences. In our time, the American dream is not a religious ideal but rather one informed more by positivism than Christianity. For most people, the term means wealth and material stability and the freedom to create the life that one desires. The Puritan ideal was to use freedom to live by virtue, as defined by Christian Scripture; the modern American ideal is to use freedom to achieve well-being, as defined by the sacred individual--that is, a Self that is fully the product of choice and consent. The Myth of Progress teaches that science and technology will empower individuals, unencumbered by limits imposed by religion and tradition, to realize their desires.

From the streets of France to the heart of American evangelical Christianity, the past three hundred years have seen many changes in the nature of redistributive social justice. Jean-Jacques Rousseau imagined a centralized power capable of achieving egalitarian equality. Karl Marx wanted to accomplish this dream through the redistribution of resources from the haves to the have-nots. Walter Rauschenbusch Christianized socialism under the banner of “social justice.” Antonio Gramsci believed it was the cultural hegemony, and not simply the haves, which was actually responsible for oppressing the have-nots. György Lukács saw capitalism as an oppressive mindset and not just an economic system. The Frankfurt School developed critical theory to analyze oppression in cultural institutions. French postmodernists, like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault deconstructed language and knowledge as social constructs and power dynamics. Kimbery Williams Crenshaw developed intersectionality, which attempts to construct a new hierarchy based on a matrix of socially constructed victim categories. Achieving social justice has gone from the redistribution of income to the redistribution of privilege, from the liberation of the lower classes to the liberation of culturally constructed identities, from lamenting victimhood to promoting victimhood, and from changing society through politics to changing politics through society. No social organization remains unaffected. Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions” is almost complete. The final stage is to capture the last stand for Western Civilization and conscious of the country—the American evangelical church.

Government alone cannot restore the economy to health. Innovation is a primary driver of economic growth. One way of measuring inventive creativeness is through patent applications. Chetty, along with Alex Bell, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova, and John Van Reenen, studied the childhoods of more than a million patent holders, linking family income with elementary test scores and other key factors. Children at the top of their third-grade math class were the most likely to become inventors—but only if they also came from a high-income family. High-scoring children who were from low-income or minority families were no more likely to become inventors than affluent children with mediocre scores. Successful inventors were also less likely to be women, Black, Latino, or from the Southeast. Chetty called these failed inventors the “lost Einsteins.” “If women, minorities, and children from low-income families were to invent at the same rate as white men from high-income (top 20%) families, the rate of innovation in America would quadruple,” the authors said. The most ominous finding by Chetty and his colleagues was the effect of Covid-19 on educational progress. Using a popular math program called Zearn, the economists plotted the achievement of children from upper-income families versus those from lower incomes. When schools shut down and instruction switched to remote learning, children in the upper-income tier suffered a small drop in the lessons completed, but low-income children fell in a hole—a 60 percent drop in the rate of progress in learning math. The long-term economic prospects for those children are dire. “We’re likely to see further erosion of social mobility the longer this lasts,” Chetty said. The American dream was drifting farther out of reach for another generation.

The drama of the unsocialized black has become the commanding motif of American culture. Driven to the wall, threatened with emasculation, surrounded everywhere by formidable women, the black male has summoned from his own body and spirit the masculine testament on which much of American manhood now subsists. Black jazz is the most important serious American music, acknowledged around the world if not in our own universities. Our rock culture finds its musical and rhythmic inspiration and its erotic energy and idiom in the jazz, gospel, dance, and soul performances of blacks. The black stage provides dramatic imagery and acting charisma for both our theaters and our films. Black vernacular pervades our speech. The black athlete increasingly dominates our sports, not only in his performance but in his expressive styles, as even white stars adopt black idioms of talk, handshakes, dress, and manner. From the home-plate celebration to the touchdown romp, American athletes are now dancing to soul music. Black men increasingly star in the American dream. This achievement is an art of the battlefield-exhibiting all that grace under pressure that is the glory of the cornered male. Ordinarily we could marvel and celebrate without any deeper pang of fear. But as the most vital expression of the culture-widely embraced by a whole generation of American youth-this black testament should be taken as a warning. For much of it lacks the signs of that submission to femininity that is the theme of enduring social order. It suggests a bitter failure of male socialization. By its very strength, it bespeaks a broader vulnerability and sexual imbalance. Thus it points to the ghetto as the exemplary crisis of our society.

Sometimes I wondered if my mother saw me as a reflection of herself. A younger, more American version of her whose sole purpose was to live out her dreams, to achieve more than she’d been able to.

The accomplishments of the women in The Counselors are a testament to the power and promise of the American Dream and are sure to resonate deeply with many young women who have the desire and the ability to make their own unique contributions to this legacy of progress. . . . Just as the women in this book were empowered by the efforts and example of those who came before them, a new generation will be inspired and encouraged by the spirit and achievements of this remarkable group.

The sort of candidate who might have benefited from such legislation is Boštjan Špetič, a Slovenian citizen, discussed previously. As founder of Zemanta, Špetič had opened his business in New York in 2009 with an L-1A visa, used to transfer a foreign company's top managers. Zemanta had an office in London and Špetič had moved to the USA from there. After a year, however, he was denied a visa renewal. “The US officers said that we didn’t have enough staff in the United States to justify a senior executive position,” recalls Špetič. “They stated that it was obvious from the organizational chart that we didn’t have an office manager, implying that no one was answering phone calls, and that’s why we could not claim a senior executive transfer. Somewhere in my office I still have four pages of explanations. At that point, I called everybody, the American ambassador in Slovenia, the Slovenian ambassador here, the Slovenian foreign ministry. My investor, Fred Wilson, got in touch with a New York senator, but no one could do anything.” Špetič therefore had to work from Ljubljana for the following three months, when a new attorney finally found the right bureaucratic avenue to obtain an L-1B visa, a specialized technology visa. “Personally, I want to move back home eventually,” says Špetič. “I’m not looking to permanently immigrate to the US. I prefer the European lifestyle. Nevertheless, this is absolutely the best place to build a startup, especially in the media space. It made so much sense to build and grow the company here. I never could have done it in Europe, and that is an amazing achievement for New York City.” For this reason, when other European entrepreneurs ask him for advice, Špetič always tells them to settle in New York, at least for a period of time, to gain American experience. And for them he dreams of creating a co-working space modeled after WeWork Labs: “Imagine a place exactly like this, but with decent coffee, wine tasting events in the evening and only non-US business people working in its offices,” explains Špetič. “There is a set of problems that foreigners have that Americans just can’t understand. Visa issues are the most obvious ones. Working-with-remote-teams issues, travel issues, personal issues such as which schools to send your children to… It’s a set of things that is different from what American startups talk about. You don’t need networking events for foreigners because you want people to network into the New York community, but a working environment would make sense because it would be like a safe haven, an extra comfort zone for foreigners with a different work culture.

The accomplishments of the women in 'The Counselors' are a testament to the power and promise of the American Dream and are sure to resonate deeply with many young women who have the desire and the ability to make their own unique contributions to this legacy of progress. . . . Just as the women in this book were empowered by the efforts and example of those who came before them, a new generation will be inspired and encouraged by the spirit and achievements of this remarkable group.

No other supporting player won three Academy Awards, and you would be hard-pressed to name another character actor whose performances frequently overwhelmed those of ostensible leads like Joel McCrea and Barbara Stanwyck in Banjo on My Knee. “We’re supporting you. Be nice to us,” McCrea and Stanwyck joked with Brennan. Those stars had the fights of their lives trying to stay on equal terms with old Walter. Sure, other character actors have had their star turns—especially in television, which gave Ward Bond in Wagon Train, Raymond Burr in Perry Mason, and Harry Morgan in M.A.S.H. their respective moments of fame—but no character actor other than Brennan dominated the Hollywood century of popular entertainment, or attained the iconic status he achieved. To follow Brennan—beginning with his career as a seven-dollar-a-day extra—is to learn all you need to know about Hollywood and its mythologizing of the American dream. Walter Brennan became an archetype, not a stereotype.

All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea. – Napoleon Hill, American

In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport.

During NASA’s first fifty years the agency’s accomplishments were admired globally. Democratic and Republican leaders were generally bipartisan on the future of American spaceflight. The blueprint for the twenty-first century called for sustaining the International Space Station and its fifteen-nation partnership until at least 2020, and for building the space shuttle’s heavy-lift rocket and deep spacecraft successor to enable astronauts to fly beyond the friendly confines of low earth orbit for the first time since Apollo. That deep space ship would fly them again around the moon, then farther out to our solar system’s LaGrange points, and then deeper into space for rendezvous with asteroids and comets, learning how to deal with radiation and other deep space hazards before reaching for Mars or landings on Saturn’s moons. It was the clearest, most reasonable and best cost-achievable goal that NASA had been given since President John F. Kennedy’s historic decision to land astronauts on the lunar surface. Then Barack Obama was elected president. The promising new chief executive gave NASA short shrift, turning the agency’s future over to middle-level bureaucrats with no dreams or vision, bent on slashing existing human spaceflight plans that had their genesis in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush White Houses. From the starting gate, Mr. Obama’s uncaring space team rolled the dice. First they set up a presidential commission designed to find without question we couldn’t afford the already-established spaceflight plans. Thirty to sixty thousand highly skilled jobs went on the chopping block with space towns coast to coast facing 12 percent unemployment. $9.4 billion already spent on heavy-lift rockets and deep space ships was unashamedly flushed down America’s toilet. The fifty-year dream of new frontiers was replaced with the shortsighted obligations of party politics. As 2011 dawned, NASA, one of America’s great science agencies, was effectively defunct. While Congress has so far prohibited the total cancellation of the space agency’s plans to once again fly astronauts beyond low earth orbit, Obama space operatives have systematically used bureaucratic tricks to slow roll them to a crawl. Congress holds the purse strings and spent most of 2010 saying, “Wait just a minute.” Thousands of highly skilled jobs across the economic spectrum have been lost while hundreds of billions in “stimulus” have been spent. As of this writing only Congress can stop the NASA killing. Florida’s senior U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, a former spaceflyer himself, is leading the fight to keep Obama space advisors from walking away from fifty years of national investment, from throwing the final spade of dirt on the memory of some of America’s most admired heroes. Congressional committees have heard from expert after expert that Mr. Obama’s proposal would be devastating. Placing America’s future in space in the hands of the Russians and inexperienced commercial operatives is foolhardy. Space legend John Glenn, a retired Democratic Senator from Ohio, told president Obama that “Retiring the space shuttles before the country has another space ship is folly. It could leave Americans stranded on the International Space Station with only a Russian spacecraft, if working, to get them off.” And Neil Armstrong testified before the Senate’s Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee that “With regard to President Obama’s 2010 plan, I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the National Academies, industry, or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement. Rumors abound that neither the NASA Administrator nor the President’s Science and Technology Advisor were knowledgeable about the plan. Lack of review normally guarantees that there will be overlooked requirements and unwelcome consequences. How could such a chain of events happen?

In other words, a culture of the casual is a culture of people who already have achieved something and who already can prove it. It is a culture of the static and the settled, the opposite of Tocqueville’s restless Americans.

Lincoln never defended rich people. His Republican Party was not the party of the 1 percent. Rather, Lincoln defended upward mobility—the right to try one’s chances at moving up the ladder, at getting rich. Lincoln’s Republican Party sought to remove government obstacles to that process. In his time the main such obstacle was slavery. Slavery, Lincoln knew, hurt the value of people’s work because it placed them in competition with slaves who worked for nothing. Today’s Republicans make a similar point about illegal immigrant labor. Illegal immigrants don’t have to pay taxes. For this and other reasons, they can price their labor markedly below that of citizens. Consequently, illegal immigration harms the upward mobility of American workers. Today’s Democrats howl that such rhetoric is racist, but since there is no implication of racial inferiority, the charge is baseless. Democrats make it only because they derive political benefits from illegal immigration. In reality, the GOP is right that illegal immigration has held back the standard of living of many American workers, making it difficult for them to achieve the upward mobility that Lincoln knew epitomized the American dream.

As Americans, we typically move full steam ahead without much regard to mindfulness or thoughtful reflection, often to one’s own detriment. Yet it is that same propensity for bold action which makes fulfilling the "American Dream" possible—where an immigrant can come to our country with nothing and achieve extraordinary things.

In 1973, 29 percent of all U.S. jobs required postsecondary education. In 1992, 52 percent did. And in 2018, a projected 62 percent of all jobs will require postsecondary education. At the same time, many students and their families came to believe that a college’s cost directly reflected the quality of the education it offered and the long-term value of the degrees it granted. Rankings like those in U.S. News & World Report reflected this biased perception and encouraged the public to think that way as well.

American dream involved some pretty basic stuff. A home you could call your own. A good job where you felt some security. A good education, and the ability to get a higher education if you wanted to pursue it. Health care you could count on. Retirement that you could count on. Those cornerstones of what it meant to be middle class were pretty universally held. People felt that if they worked hard they could get there. It was achievable.

Do you want to be safe, or do you really want to change the world? The conflict is that we want to be brave, we want to take risks . . .but we also want to be safe. The problem is, we can't have it both ways. We want the American dream: to graduate from high school, go college, get a degree, and then what? Find the love of your life and get married. Then what? Get a job. Then what? Buy a car, buy a house, buy life insurance. Then what? Grow old and retire. Then what? ls that it? ls that all there is? In fact, couldn't we just sum up the entire American dream in the single word "safety"? That's what it's all about. No matter what you want out of life, you can achieve it in America in comfort, style, and in the end, safety. But there is a problem. We cannot be safe and take risks at the same time. Eleanor Roosevelt said, 'You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do' and 'Do something every day that scares you.' This can get messy. It gets uncomfortable. It means touching people who are dying of diseases. It means going to the filthy slums, the garbage dumps, the places we would never normally go . . . just to reach that one hurting person. So we must answer the question: Do we want to stay safe, or do we want to change the world? We can't have it both ways.

Between the carnival barker nature of our society—in which the winner, winner, winners are pronounced and paraded about with great fanfare so as to perpetuate the dream—and our overt obsession with wealth as a society, it appears as though more than half the people in our lives are rich. And yes, clearly, we can consciously separate the reality of those that we interact with personally from those whom we merely watch from a distance. But make no mistake, the American Dream appears alive and well when half of the people that you can name are millionaires, and it doesn’t matter whether you know any of them personally. Really, this illusion is probably worse now than ever, because we live in a world in which Facebook allows us to hoard past acquaintances like trinkets in the junk drawer. These people have about as much direct interaction with us as the millionaires who are trotted before us on the newsstands, on the radio, on the television, at the stadium, in the movies, in the bookstore, and of course, in Congress. The fact of the matter is, you can almost certainly name more winners of the American Dream than you can personal friends, even if you include all of your acquaintances. This means, every time we see yet another famous person on TV, we are likely watching someone who is the beneficiary of the American Dream. And some of those Dreamers may even have a good story about how they rose from poverty to achieve their accomplishments, which is often held up as evidence that you, no matter who you are, or from whence you came, with hard work, can become a bona fide multimillionaire. No, you really can’t. It’s a mirage. A charade. A farce. An illusion, in which a long shot is presented as if it’s even odds.

There are, by the way, I will note, some politicians who suggest that some people in this country are lazy and don't want to work. I don't believe that. I think Americans want to work. Americans want the self-respect that comes from going to the office, from working, from providing for your family, from working to achieve the American dream.   Do some people give up? Sure. Can you give in to hopelessness? Yes. When you keep banging your head against a wall over and over again, trying to get a job, and you don't get anywhere, it is only natural for people to feel despair. I want you to think of the millions of jobs we could have but for small businesses that are not growing, not expanding, not creating those jobs.   Another

The new American dream is to go viral,” to achieve celebrity by having your image explode across the digital firmament.

dramatically, but helium gas was 10 times as expensive. Under these conditions, Dr. Eckener, a pilot whose primary concern was safety and as Director of a Company attempting to make a profit, he was forced to make a difficult decision. His discussions with American businessmen and political officials had not resulted in the helium gas he so badly wanted. On the other hand he realized, an airship without lifting gas could not fly. His own company officials believed hydrogen to be safe and they did not share the American concern nor that of Eckener. During many of the flights in 1936, U.S. Naval officials were onboard the LZ-129, to study German operating methods of using hydrogen gas. Their resulting reports concluded that hydrogen properly used, was safe and should be considered used in any new or future American airships. The building of a dream The LZ-129 was a typical design for a Zeppelin airship, only it’s size was so remarkable. The structure was primarily built of triangular girders made of Duralumin, the interior was divided by a wire braced main frame, into 16 bays, in which each held a gas cell.2 Duralumin was an alloy of aluminum and copper with traces of magnesium, manganese, iron and silicon. It had been discovered by Dr. Alfred Wilm and his assistant Ing. Jablonsky, in September 1906. Late one Saturday evening, Jablonsky had completed testing numerous pieces and was ready to go home, when Dr. Wilm entered the lab, with just one more test. To everyone’s astonishment, the test piece was harder, with only ½% more Magnesium having been added. The last train for Berlin had departed and the two men worked the through the weekend, to perfect their Duralumin. Although Dr. Wilm wanted to obtain a patent on this new metal, that so many industries so badly required, he failed to take action. By not obtaining a patent, he gave German industry the opportunity to copy. Count von Zeppelin was amongst the first to realize the value of this new material. Dr. Alfred Wilm did not achieve the wealth he so rightfully desired and passed away on a small farm in the Riesengebirge, on August 6, 1937. Dr. Wilm placed an important mark on not only Zeppelin history, but in the design of countless airplanes ever since.3 The first Zeppelin airships had been constructed of simple aluminum, which is considerably weaker, so that strength was a major problem. It was not until LZ-26, which was the only Zeppelin assembled in Frankfurt-Rebstock, that Duralumin was practically used. Designed as a passenger airship, production of it’s parts had begun, when World War One started. Suddenly, this airship was no longer needed for civilian purposes and would fulfill military requirements only marginally. In order to provide space in the Friedrichshafen Zeppelin Sheds, for newer and larger designs; the completed girders and materials were transported to Frankfurt for assembly. The ship, approx. only 1/8 the

Americans could achieve Jefferson’s democratic freedoms through Hamilton’s economic development strategies and trade policies.

the American Dream: a man fights for what he wants, never gives up, and eventually achieves his wildest dreams.

How could something that homosexuals don’t need swing the general opinion about homosexuality? Sanger and birth control, particularly the arrival of the Pill, transformed sex in the American and Western mind. Prior to these generally effective, though certainly not foolproof, ways of controlling birth—something previous generations of feminists could have only dreamed of—sexuality was always tightly connected in people’s minds with fertility. Sex meant children. With birth control’s arrival, sex no longer had to include children. Sex could be only about pleasure and uniting a couple together, through the release of significant bonding hormones. Suddenly, sex could be about feelings and pleasure it produced without any concern for babies. It took a while for the childless notion of sex to take hold of culture, but as the LGBT+ movement made inroads, people began to ask themselves: How is their sex any different than ours? We do it for pleasure. They do it for pleasure. We don’t have children unless we want to children. They don’t have children. Fertility and babies became terribly passé unless one was actively trying to achieve pregnancy or if something didn’t work as promised.

So when I was nineteen, I did the only thing I felt like I could do to go on living my life: I bought a fake green card and a social security card. After college, I moved to New York City to work at Goldman Sachs on Wall Street, one of the most prestigious financial institutions in the world. I lived in constant fear of anyone finding out that my documents were fake and I wasn’t supposed to be working. But despite the challenges and fears, I became a vice president at the age of twenty-seven. I had achieved all my professional goals. One night in 2007, I called my dad in Mexico, and we had a long heart-to-heart conversation. I asked for his forgiveness for calling the cops. He asked me to forgive him for his drinking, for hitting me, and for putting me in a position where I had to call the police. I am so grateful for that conversation with my dad.

The goal is to achieve an internal calmness that comes when your intellect and your instincts are operating in harmony.

Meanwhile, our politicians, global corporations, and money changers have redefined the American Dream. Many of us grew up not even knowing that we were considered "poor," but now it seems that no one can stand the thought of not being rich. Politicians and the media told us that America is about having the most stuff, the nicest cars, and the biggest homes. Almost everyone, it seemed, was in it for themselves. Compassion, we were told, was a victim of capitalism. We should now see that for the lie it is. Compassion and capitalism go hand in hand, but compassion does not go with what these people are really promoting: greed. . . . In short, politicians promised us a new, easier way to success and happiness---and many of us too eagerly embraced and promoted it. . . . There are no shortcuts in achieving and living the American Dream. It takes hard work, relentless dedication to your core principles and values, and, above all, patience.

each concrete bungalow a kind of American dream achieved no matter how crooked the mortgage.

I'm not so much interested in creating literature as I am in trying to convey the pressure of what I've witnessed or experienced. Writing and rewriting until one achieves a literary form, a strict form, just bleeds the life from a experience-no blood left is it isn't raw. How do we talk, how do we think not in novellas or paragraphs but in associations, in sometimes disjointed currents.

Ironically, as the economist Raj Chetty has shown, these days you are twice as likely to achieve the American Dream if you live in Canada than if you are a US citizen.

But even at a young age, without understanding what these things were, we sensed them as we kicked our way through the currents of our day. We could feel it looming somewhere, large and dark beneath everything: our parents’ pain. So when the hands came, we offered our cheeks. We offered ourselves as conduits for their anguish because they had suffered so we wouldn’t, so we could watch Saturday morning cartoons and eat sugary cereal and go to college and trust the government and never go hungry. We excused all of it, absorbed the slaps and the burns and the canings and converted them into perfect report cards to wipe away our parents’ brutal pasts. We did the work, as they like to say now. We got into good colleges, got internships and postdocs, and eventually moved on to successful, rewarding careers in big cities that paid us enough money to buy high-end audio gear for our modernist apartments. We achieved the American Dream because we had no other choice.

Within positivity culture, immigrants and people of color are expected to be grateful for what they have and to embrace the pursuit of happiness developed by the Founding Fathers. If they aren't satisfied, they can just "go back to where you came from." Conversely, we use positive stereotypes to reinforce the types of people who have "made it" within this system. We say things like "She's a strong Black woman" without questioning why Black women have to be so strong and why we expect this from them. The happy, contributing immigrant is celebrated for achieving the narrow definition of the American dream against all odds. Even though these stereotypes are positive and often given as compliments, they become quite restrictive for anyone within the group who can't live up to them.

was drilled into us that success should not be measured in dollars; the truly successful person creates a family whose members are able to enjoy meaningful lives. And what gives life greater meaning is the opportunity to contribute to the community. Then Dad would lower his voice, as if to emphasize one final point: “No one in our society can have that unless everyone has a chance to achieve the American dream.

To Langston Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois, Bigger Thomas was more stereotype than sociology; to White Chicago, he just inspired fear. The deepest impact of Wright’s success, though, was that he’d achieved it without the Rosenwald Fund, the NAACP, or any of the other institutional sources that usually supported black artists.

Bukowski’s life embodies the American Dream: a man fights for what he wants, never gives up, and eventually achieves his wildest dreams.

The task is to preserve and promote individual differences in ways that are respectful. Comparable, in reverse, to the American tendency to blame oneself for not achieving the American Dream, in Japan there is a tendency to blame oneself for not fitting in with or conforming to group norms and

Stories like Bukowski’s are the bread and butter of our cultural narrative. Bukowski’s life embodies the American Dream: a man fights for what he wants, never gives up, and eventually achieves his wildest dreams. It’s practically a movie waiting to happen. We all look at stories like Bukowski’s and say, “See? He never gave up. He never stopped trying. He always believed in himself. He persisted against all the odds and made something of himself!

The Eclipse ofAchievement In a society in which the dream of success has been drained of any meaning beyond itself, men have nothing against which to measure their achievements except the achievements of others. Self-approval depends on public recognition and acclaim, and the quality of this approval has undergone important changes in its own right. The good opinion of friends and neighbors, which formerly informed a man that he had lived a useful life, rested on appreciation of his accomplishments. Today men seek the kind of approval that applauds not their actions but their personal attributes. They wish to be not so much esteemed as admired. They crave not fame but the glamour and excitement of celebrity. They want to be envied rather than respected. Pride and acquisitiveness, the sins of an ascendant capitalism, have given way to vanity. Most Americans would still define success as riches, fame, and power, but their actions show that they have little interest in the substance of these attainments. What a man does matters less than the fact that he has "made it." Whereas fame depends on the performance of notable deeds acclaimed in biography and works of history, celebrity-the reward of those who project a vivid or pleasing exterior or have otherwise attracted attention to themselves-is acclaimed in the news media, in gossip columns, on talk shows, in magazines devoted to "personalities." Accordingly it is evanescent, like news itself, which loses its interest when it loses its novelty. Worldly success has always carried with it a certain poignancy, an awareness that "you can't take it with you"; but in our time, when success is so largely a function of youth, glamour, and novelty, glory is more fleeting than ever, and those who win the attention of the public worry incessantly about losing it.

This is the shadow of hope. Knowing that we may never see the realization of our dreams, and yet still showing up. I do not believe that I or my children or my grandchildren will live in an America that has achieved racial equality. I do not believe this is a problem that America will fix within any soon-coming generation. And so I stand in the legacy of all that Black Americans have already accomplished—in their resistance, in their teachings, in their voices, in their faith—and I work toward a world unseen, currently unimaginable.

It was a tough journey, though, and I realize that some people don’t have the endurance, or the faith, to continue in the face of such great resistance. But not a day goes by when I don’t meet someone who’s also put it all on the line and is working their butt off to achieve their professional and personal dreams.

On the cusp of the 1970s, as the space program approached its zenith, the civil rights movement—or rather many of the goals it had set out to achieve—were beginning to feel as if they were in a state of suspended animation. There were real and shining triumphs, certainly: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 pried Jim Crow’s legal grip off the country’s workplaces, modes of transportation, public spaces, and voting box. But the economic and social mobility that had been held hostage by that legal discrimination remained stuck.

Is the cause of America the cause of all mankind? And what is that cause after all? From distant glimmerings of “America” (the Waldseemüller map of 1507) to “City upon a Hill” and “Magnalia Christi Americana,” into the nineteenth century with “American Scholar” and the “[slaves’] fourth of July,” and continued throughout the twentieth century with “double-consciousness,” “Trans-national America,” “settlement ideal,” “American Dream,” “I have a dream,” “Postethnic America,” “Achieving . . . America,” and the “heyday of the fuzzies,” Americans have been trying to figure this out for quite some time. Over the course of the centuries, Americans learned and self-taught, native born and immigrant, religious and secular, and left and right have contributed to this long conversation by offering new arguments and key terms for Americans to think about the world, themselves, their truth, and their America. No one, so far, has been successful in answering these questions once and for all. They only came up with provisional explanations and then posed new questions. Perhaps we should not want it any other way. And so the conversation of American thought continues.

UNION AND CHANGE The third article was union. To those who were small and few against the wilderness, the success of liberty demanded the strength of union. Two centuries of change have made this true again. No longer need capitalist and worker, farmer and clerk, city and countryside, struggle to divide our bounty. By working shoulder to shoulder, together we can increase the bounty of all. We have discovered that every child who learns, every man who finds work, every sick body that is made whole--like a candle added to an altar--brightens the hope of all the faithful. So let us reject any among us who seek to reopen old wounds and to rekindle old hatreds. They stand in the way of a seeking nation. Let us now join reason to faith and action to experience, to transform our unity of interest into a unity of purpose. For the hour and the day and the time are here to achieve progress without strife, to achieve change without hatred--not without difference of opinion, but without the deep and abiding divisions which scar the union for generations. THE AMERICAN BELIEF Under this covenant of justice, liberty, and union we have become a nation--prosperous, great, and mighty. And we have kept our freedom. But we have no promise from God that our greatness will endure. We have been allowed by Him to seek greatness with the sweat of our hands and the strength of our spirit. I do not believe that the Great Society is the ordered, changeless, and sterile battalion of the ants. It is the excitement of becoming--always becoming, trying, probing, falling, resting, and trying again--but always trying and always gaining. In each generation, with toil and tears, we have had to earn our heritage again. If we fail now, we shall have forgotten in abundance what we learned in hardship: that democracy rests on faith, that freedom asks more than it gives, and that the judgment of God is harshest on those who are most favored. If we succeed, it will not be because of what we have, but it will be because of what we are; not because of what we own, but, rather because of what we believe. For we are a nation of believers. Underneath the clamor of building and the rush of our day's pursuits, we are believers in justice and liberty and union, and in our own Union. We believe that every man must someday be free. And we believe in ourselves. Our enemies have always made the same mistake. In my lifetime--in depression and in war--they have awaited our defeat. Each time, from the secret places of the American heart, came forth the faith they could not see or that they could not even imagine. It brought us victory. And it will again. For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest sleeping in the unplowed ground. Is our world gone? We say "Farewell." Is a new world coming? We welcome it--and we will bend it to the hopes of man. To these trusted public servants and to my family and those close friends of mine who have followed me down a long, winding road, and to all the people of this Union and the world, I will repeat today what I said on that sorrowful day in November 1963: "I will lead and I will do the best I can." But you must look within your own hearts to the old promises and to the old dream. They will lead you best of all. For myself, I ask only, in the words of an ancient leader: "Give me now wisdom and knowledge, that I may go out and come in before this people: for who can judge this thy people, that is so great?

The goal is not to turn Zimbabwe into the United States or to turn decaying neighborhoods into wealthy suburbs. Nor is the goal to reshape the world into the image of Western Christianity. We are not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Rather, the goal is to seek to be as much like the New Jerusalem as possible. And to achieve that goal, we need a different story of change, one that is centered on the gospel, the good news that most of us don’t really understand.

The peril we face today is not only that America might fail to live up to its promise, but that Americans might stop believing in that promise or the need to fight for it. The increasing belief on the left that this promise was always a lie, or on the right that it has always been true and has already been achieved, are two sides of the same coin.

The road to success is not easy to navigate, but with hard work, drive, and passion, it's possible to achieve the American dream

The “American Dream” is grounded in the promise of the transcendence of social class boundaries, as in the opportunity to enable one’s children to climb the social ladder through educational and financial achievement. The mythology of upward mobility encourages Americans (including many in the academy) to pathologize poverty and disregard the influence of privilege

When Zuckerman and Silk are together and testing each other, Roth's writing reaches an emotional intensity and a vividness not exceeded in any of his books. The American dream of starting over entirely new has the force of inevitability here, and Roth's judgment clearly is that you can never make it all the way. There is no comfort in this vision, but the tranquility Zuckerman achieves as he tells the story is infectious, and that is a certain reward.

Friends, our tasks as Americans is to strive for social and industrial justice, achieved through the genuine rule of the people... In order to succeed, we need leaders of inspired idealism, leaders to whom are granted great visions, dream greatly and strive to make their dreams come true; who can kindle the people with the fire from their own burning souls. The leader for the time being, whoever he may be, is but an instrument, to be used until broken and then to be cast aside: and if he is worth his salt he will care no more when he is broken than a soldier cares when he is sent where his life is forefit in order that the victory be won. In the long fight for righteousness the watchword for all us is spend and be spent. It is of little matter whether any one man fails or succeeds; but the cause should not fail.”, for it is the cause of all mankind.

To provide at least some partial answers to these questions, we will describe God’s “story of change.” A story of change—often referred to as a “theory of change” in the social service sector—answers two key questions: 1. What is the goal of life? 2. How can this goal be achieved?2 Stories of change are powerful.

It started on September 11,2001. Like so many of us, Bruder turned his attention to the Middle East after the attacks to ask why something like that could happen. He understood that if such an event could happen once, it could happen again, and for the lives of his own daughters he wanted to find a way to prevent that. In the course of trying to figure out what he could do, he made a remarkable discovery that went much deeper than protecting his daughters or even the prevention of terrorism in the United States. In America, he realized, the vast majority of young people wake up in the morning with a feeling that there is opportunity for them in the future. Regardless of the economy, most young boys and girls who grow up in the United States have an inherent sense of optimism that they can achieve something if they want to—to live the American Dream. A young boy growing up in Gaza or a young girl living in Yemen does not wake up every day with the same feeling. Even if they have the desire, the same optimism is not there. It is too easy to point and say that the culture is different. That is not actionable. The real reason is that there is a distinct lack of institutions to give young people in the region a sense of optimism for their future. A college education in Jordan, for example, may offer some social status, but it doesn't necessarily prepare a young adult for what lies ahead. The education system, in cases like this, perpetuates a systemic cultural pessimism. Bruder realized the problems we face with terrorism in the West have less to do with what young boys and girls in the Middle East think about America and more to do with what they think about themselves and their own vision of the future. Through the EFE Foundation, Bruder is setting up programs across the Middle East to teach young adults the hard and soft skills that will help them feel like they have opportunity in life. To feel like they can be in control of their own destinies. Bruder is using the EFE Foundation to share his WHY on a global scale—to teach people that there is always an alternative to the path they think they are on. The Education for Employment Foundation is not an American charity hoping to do good in faraway lands. It is a global movement. Each EFE operation runs independently, with locals making up the majority of their local boards. Local leaders take personal responsibility to give young men and women that feeling of opportunity by giving them the skills, knowledge and, most importantly, the confidence to choose an alternative path for themselves. In Yemen, children can expect to receive nine years of education. This is one of the lowest rates in the world. In the United States, children can expect sixteen years. Inspired by Bruder, Aleryani sees such an amazing opportunity for young men and women to change their perspective and take greater control of their own future. He set out to find capital to jump-start his EFE operation in Sana'a, Yemen's capital, and in one week was able to raise $50,000. The speed at which he raised that amount is pretty good even by our philanthropic standards. But this is Yemen, and Yemen has no culture of philanthropy, making his achievement that much more remarkable. Yemen is also one of the poorest nations in the region. But when you tell people WHY you're doing what you're doing, remarkable things happen. Across the region, everyone involved in EFE believes that they can help teach their brothers and sisters and sons and daughters the skills that will help them change path that they think they are on. They are working to help the youth across the region believe that their future is bright and full of opportunity. And they don't do it for Bruder, they do it for themselves. That's the reason EFE will change the world.

For all its tropical beauty there was something charmless and hard about it, a vulgarity as decidedly American as the picture industry which thrived on the constant waves of transplants eager for work, offering them nothing more substantial than sunshine. It was a city of strangers, but, unlike New York, the dream L.A. sold, like any Shangri-La, was one not of surpassing achievement but unlimited ease, a state attainable by only the very rich and the dead. Half beach, half desert, the place was never meant to be habitable. The heat was unrelenting. On the streets there was a weariness that seemed even more pronounced at night, visible through the yellow windows of burger joints and drugstores about to close, leaving their few customers nowhere to go. Inconceivably, he was one of that rootless tribe now, doomed to wander the boulevards, and again he marveled at his own fall, and at his capacity for appreciating it.

From the outset, the BRI has been presented as a model of ‘inclusive globalisation’ and aimed at those who feel shut out. The language plays to the dream of global harmony through trade and cultural exchange. When Xi Jinping uses the phrase ‘community of shared future’, the subtext is that China’s new world order will replace the postwar American hegemony. The BRI can be seen as the CCP’s principal vehicle for promoting and entrenching the Party’s alternative discourse system for the world. To the outside world, Xi and other leaders talk about ‘win-win cooperation’, and ‘a big family of harmonious co-existence’ and ‘a bridge for peace and East-West cooperation’, but in discussions at home, the talk is of achieving global discursive and geostrategic dominance.

The American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement … It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

By paying my employees better and giving them a shot at achieving the American Dream, I was giving my company its best chance to succeed as well.