Alex Higgins Quotes

Better educated than wealthy

Some men will be always able to pay more for their children's education than others; and that those children will, inevitably, win in the struggle of life.

I never really grew up being political or Labour. It was just a realisation that where you were born mattered. That how you spoke mattered... who you knew mattered.

I don't believe in private education.

The Margaret Thatchers of this country made it through - like I did - because of the grammar school system, which gave the opportunity of a lifetime to working-class kids. It put them on a level playing field with the privately educated kids, and opened up the top universities to them.

Football is generally a working-class sport, and because of the fact I went to private school and was brought up slightly differently, people think that makes me a different person.

People's fates in life are decided largely by their schools.

I went to private school, but I've got family from North Carolina.

I think there's a certain sense of grounding that comes from not being a rich kid from a media-elite school.

Outside of the family, education is the greatest determinant of social mobility.

The benefit of rich families putting their child through Harvard is always going to exist. But it's quite evident that there are 700 million peasants in China who are never going to go to Harvard.

I went to boarding school, and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.

I had no need to apologize that the look-wider, search-more affirmative action that Princeton and Yale practiced had opened doors for me. That was its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run.

I couldn't help but to think back to my classmates at Thomas Jefferson High School in San Antonio. They had the same talent, the same brains, the same dreams as the folks we sat with at Stanford and Harvard. I realized the difference wasn't one of intelligence or drive. The difference was opportunity.

The terror of the ordinary is what keeps many affluent, educated parents and their kids out of the merely 'decent' schools, the ones that are simply 'fine.'

Class is something I know about. I've lived it every day of my life, and it shaped me in my identity.

Over time, my students have gotten richer and more educated.

I grew up in leafy suburbs in north and east Belfast, but if I had been born a mile down the road closer to the city centre, you might never heard of me.

I didn't go to the right schools, didn't come from a well-known family, nor was I even remotely connected to a powerful publishing dynasty.

I was lucky to grow up at a time when it was not difficult for the child of a tenant farmer to make his way to the state university.

I am not posh. I went to a comprehensive school.

Early admission programs tend to advantage the advantaged.

I don't believe that the American dream should be reserved for those who are born into the elite or somehow have been given an advantage over others. My growing-up experience is probably the most important thing that guides my priorities and my work today.

My parents were the first in our family to go to grammar school. My grandparents were in service.

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? … Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.