Charles Barkley Quotes

I'm every bourgeois nightmare - a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.

If you are poor today, you will always be poor. Only the rich now acquire riches.

The upwardly mobile American is becoming a statistical oddity..

Most Americans seem to be stuck in the economic strata to which they were born.

Poor people who had escaped from poverty as I had, feared it, hated it and fled from it all their lives. Those born rich could afford to be touched by it.

Aspiration, it seems, is in danger of becoming the preserve of the wealthy.

I am who I am. I can't pretend to be somebody who makes $25,000 a year.

I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor.

What many economists fail to understand is that poor people are no less concerned about improving their lot and that of their children than rich people are.

I still consider myself working class. I know my circumstances have changed dramatically since I was growing up back in Birkenhead.

It isn't the rich people's fault that poor people are poor. Poor people who get an education and work hard in this country will stop being poor. That should be the goal for all poor people everywhere.

Our main task is not to see that people of great wealth add to it, but that those without much money have a greater chance to earn some.

I'm tired of people on trust funds telling people on food stamps how to live.

The association of poverty with progress is the enigma of our times.

Maybe it’s that silver spoon in his [Mitt Romney’s] mouth that keeps him from seeing why the middle class doesn’t pull itself up by its bootstraps, like he did when Daddy loaned him his first million dollars.

These institutions are generally more skilled at getting rich off those living in the lower economic reaches than they are in preparing them for the job market.

… perceptions of poverty have gone up because there’s been rising inequality.

Today, if you were raised poor, you're just as likely to stay poor as you were 50 years ago.

I was as middle class as it comes.

I don't think of anyone as rich or poor.

If you don't have money or you come from a background that doesn't have money, it's harder to achieve your ambition in life. It's not that you can't, but it becomes harder. Inequality is one of the worst things that can exist in our society, so I am interested in those kind of things.

70% of children born into poverty will never make it to the middle class. The uncomfortable truth is that there are now a number of other countries with as much or more opportunity than ours. In fact, more people in Canada go on to surpass the income of their parents than in the United States.

If you are low income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than getting a 4-year degree.

Choice dependent on wealth; those are the Tory words.

The traditional story of economists has been to say education explains what the returns are to school. I say, 'Okay, that's fine, but what explains the education? How much is just a matter of my giving you a poor kid versus a rich kid?'