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As President Trump quickly moved to limit immigration, civil rights, and environmental protections, I felt fear for my young children, and guilt, too - as if I'd somehow betrayed the unspoken contract all parents make to give our children a better life than ourselves.
My parents, Romanian immigrants, struggled to provide me a better life than the ones they had left in their homeland. They worked hard to give me every opportunity in life, and once I showed natural talent as a young gymnast, they spent every last penny on my training.
Even coming from Ghana to the United States, my mom and dad did so much to provide a better life for their kids. It was such a huge sacrifice; leaving your entire family - and we have a huge family - leaving them to come to America and have a better life for their kids.
Rey's parents left her at 5, and we meet her when she's late teens or early 20s, and for someone to keep hopeful that there's a better life to come, I think, is astounding. Though she starts off alone, she very much finds her place in a group of people, and that's lovely.
We're all sick of holy wars and bloodshed because religion is supposed to give us life and a better life and is supposed to bring out our best self. When it results in mass destruction and hatred and anxiety, it's the antithesis I think of what religion was designed to do.
In the fall of 1978, I left the religious, conservative, biracial, slow-paced culture of South Carolina for the secular, liberal, multi-ethnic, intense culture of Princeton University. Like most immigrants, I was looking for a better life in a place I only half understood.
Our daughter was not damaged or hurt in any way. She was simply relinquished to foster care by two people who were not ready to be parents. I admire them for giving her the chance for a better life. And I am grateful they gave my husband and me the opportunity to be parents.
America isn't Congress. America isn't Washington. America is the striving immigrant who starts a business, or the mom who works two low-wage jobs to give her kid a better life. America is the union leader and the CEO who put aside their differences to make the economy stronger.
People come to L.A. because they're chasing that dream of a better life. That's why I came here, because I thought it would be a place where I would find other people like me; people who wanted to write, people who had a dream of being something else. And that proved to be true.
In the fields of southwest Iowa, my parents and grandparents worked and sacrificed. Like so many Iowans, the American Dream for them was never about wealth or fame. Their dream was to leave their children and grandchildren a better life, with greater opportunity, than their own.
What the Khmer Rouge had in store was a radical agrarian revolution, one with the professed aim of completely renovating society while giving the peasants a better life, of evening the rewards and feeding the hungry, of bringing a rational and utilitarian nation-state into being.
Oprah Winfrey's global influence is unparalleled. Not only has her generosity and firm belief that education is the key to a better life benefited countless women and children around the world, but her example has also inspired millions of people to give back in ways big and small.
In my life, I have learned that most people want the same thing. They are not driven by class resentment. What they want most is to make a better life for themselves and their families - and to know that the opportunities for their children will be better than they were for themselves.
In my experience, all Americans - Republicans, Democrats, and everyone in between - want roughly the same thing: an assurance that if they work hard, they can create a better life for themselves and their families. They want to feel safe in their communities and secure in their future.
As a kid, I remember wondering why we lived in an apartment, not in a brownstone, and why we drove an LTD, not a Cadillac. Even now, I'm like that. If I'm on the 5th floor, I will wonder why I'm not on the 6th floor. But that was my drive. I was obsessed with my family having a better life.
We weren't dirt poor, but there was no spare money kicking around. While it was very much understood that the way to a better life was through education, books were a luxury we couldn't afford. But when I was six, we actually moved opposite the central library, and that became my home from home.
My father passed away a few days before my election. This man, an African American born to a poor single mother in 1936 in the South, would worry in the last years of his life that he had better life chances when he was growing up than a young man born in the same circumstances would have today.
The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children's cartoons or utopian novels. But it's just a fantasy.
I am a legal immigrant whose parents went from Russia to China to Chile to finally reach the United States and thereby give me a chance to have a better life. I served six years in the U.S. Army Reserve, went to college, have a successful career and have dedicated my life to being a good citizen.
At 9 years old, I moved in with my father because my mother could no longer care for me. Looking back, I now see so many similarities between my own childhood and that of my sons. My father stepped in when I needed him, and that gave me the chance for a better life. That's what I'm doing for my boys now.
My dad is an ob-gyn - he's retired now - and he wanted to come to the States to make a better life, for opportunity. My mom said that, on the plane ride here, I did not want to speak a word of English - I spoke Tagalog. And then, after the first day of school, I didn't want to speak anything but English.
Every day, I wake up determined to deliver a better life for the people all across this nation that have been neglected, ignored, and abandoned. I have visited the laid-off factory workers and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country.
The little platoon of the black community is the church. Our Christian faith is based on individual freedom from sin and the personal decision to find spiritual liberty that leads to a better life here on Earth and for eternity. On Sundays in America, the most conservative people can be found in black churches.
Ask any parent what we want for our children, and invariably we say 'a better life.' To that end, we give our time, our sleep, our money, and our dreams, much as our parents did before us. We all want a better life for our children. But what we want for them ceases to matter if we leave them an unlivable world.
Of course the lower classes have always felt downtrodden and aspired to a better life. But there is this theory that people respond to a class structure in England - there was a time when people knew who they were and knew whom they served and as long as management wasn't abusive, it was a good life for people.
In grade school I was taught that the United States is a melting pot. People from all over the world come here for freedom and to pursue a better life. They arrive with next to nothing, work incredibly hard, learn a new language and new customs, and in a generation they become an integral part of our amazing nation.
I traveled to Ireland to research 'Sandcastles,' to visit the coastline where my ancestors looked toward America, the tiny town they once loved so much, and the docks from which they sailed toward their dreams of building a better life for their family. The answers I found on that journey are woven through the novel.
I'm very proud of my love for Whitney Houston. She really changed my life. She made my life a better life. She was so beautiful in her love for God, her love for her family and her love for music. She truly loved her music. She could do everything! She had flawless rhythm, flawless pitch, flawless feeling, and flawless beauty.
The early pioneers of both wellness and network marketing were motivated by the sense that it was possible to create a better life than the conventional routes offered - better personal health and better economic health, respectively. Now the 'alternatives' of yesterday have become the economic powerhouses of today and tomorrow.
I was born in Hereford, England, in 1944. We moved when they had an opportunity to get a visa, about 1950. My dad always thought Europe was a bit too small for him. He wanted to see the United States... The typical immigrant story. He wanted a better life for his children, too. He always tried to get the visa, and it didn't come up.
I am a permanent legal resident of this country, I was born in Korea; my parents came to America for a better life for our family, I've lived here nearly my whole life, and even though I consider myself through and through Korean and American, I guess when it comes down to it, anyone can take away my identity. It doesn't belong to me.
We need a sustainable system of student finance that promotes opportunity, encourages aspiration, increases social mobility and is governed by fairness. But all the Tories can offer is unsustainable, mounting debt, punishing students for wanting an education. And discouraging thousands of young people from climbing the ladder to a better life.
Growing up where I grew up, we looked to athletes. They were our first heroes. They came from the same places we came from. I mean, you can't watch TV and see someone who is successful that you can really relate to. That person isn't real; he doesn't exist. But athletes traveled the world, had these big houses and gave their families a better life.