Disadvantaged Backgrounds Quotes

I'm not writing about the 1 percent of people who have this fairy-tale, amazing life. I'm writing about people like me, who maybe had a rough childhood.

I remember feeling guilty that I had a good childhood. I thought everybody who is famous has to have a desperate childhood and work his way out of it, but I had a great one.

I think with fighting you have to have a desire to achieve something. You never see a rich kid get to the top of any combat sport because they don't have the drive. All the great boxers come from the ghetto. They all had nothing. They have the desire, the hunger but the rich kid is not going to get punched in the face. Why would they?

Students from disadvantaged backgrounds will have the most debt, and then, being less likely than their affluent peers to go straight into high paying jobs, they will spend most of their working lives trying but failing to pay off that debt.

At my school, when kids went into the army at 16, they didn't do it in a gung-ho, Tom Cruise, 'Born on the Fourth of July' way. They were generally - and I hope this doesn't offend them - the more vulnerable members of the class. They enlisted seeking family, and they didn't always find it.

Black women have a kind of advantage over white women in the workplace. They go in prepared to face some discrimination, so when it happens, they aren't shocked.

I was lucky because I had parents who have enabled me to do whatever I was passionate about and never held my siblings and me back from anything. But I think a lot of people don't have that experience.

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.

Few escape our most deprived estates. Few young people with potential escape difficult upbringings. Fewer cross the social divides.

Minority founders often feel like they are on the outside looking in when it comes to Silicon Valley and tech startups in general.

I think it's important for us as a society to remember that the youth within juvenile justice systems are, most of the time, youths who simply haven't had the right mentors and supporters around them - because of circumstances beyond their control.

Training is expensive, and a lot of kids don't get trained, perhaps. So I also identify with the kid or the person who has grown up in environments like I've grown up in.

I've always wanted to write about the other side of the tracks, the have-nots, maybe because that's who I was.