John Stuart Mill Quotes

Freedom was conditioned by man's physical body, heredity, and environment.

I think there's great potential for autonomy, but we have to remember that we live in a world where people may have free will but have not invented their circumstances.

Class still matters in Britain today.

It's inevitable your environment will influence what you do.

Man is a child of his environment.

I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness.

I was poor white trash, no glitter, no glamour, but I'm not ashamed of anything.

You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.

Situational variables can exert powerful influences over human behavior, more so that we recognize or acknowledge.

We're all influenced by everything unless we're locked in an empty room.

The spirit of the age, as it is revealed to each of us, is too often only the spirit of the group in which the accidents of birth or education or occupation or fellowship have given us a place.

How we behave in our public lives inevitably reflects values, attitudes and experiences embedded in our private lives and vice versa.

Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.

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

The ‘poor white’ is actually degraded; the mountain white is a person not yet graded up.

Like politics, all status is ultimately local - people compare themselves to those they live near.

You're not going to have something set on a council estate that explores all elements of human existence, the variety of experience inherent in any community.

Growing up in inner-city neighborhoods, there's a particular structure, which I'm sure is true of most social contexts. The type of person you are determines the role you play.

Things don't happen in a vacuum, and artists don't make work in a vacuum.

Growing up in a specific area has a certain sociological and economic reason, so I'm interested in using myself as a case study to look as those things.

The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.

No one acts or experiences in a vacuum.

There's nothing that you like in this world that wasn't influenced by a bunch of key things; nothing came completely clean out of a vacuum.

I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing....It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.

An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.