Lack of Opportunity Quotes

The slave labors, but with no cheer - it is not the road to respectability, it will honor him with no citizens' trust, it brings no bread to his family, no grain to his garner, no leisure in after-days, no books or papers to his children. It opens no school-house door, builds no church, rears for him no factory, lays no keel, fills no bank, earns no acres. With sweat and toil and ignorance he consumes his life, to pour the earnings into channels from which he does no drink, into hands that never honor him. But perpetually rob and often torment.

I believe welfare makes you lazy and unproductive.

Many of the young people living in inner-city America don't see themselves - I mean, they even talk about things like death and dying. And there's a tremendous loss of hope. And of all the things to lose, I think nothing is worse or more difficult to overcome than the loss of hope.

The wiping out of crime is so largely an economic question because much crime arises from the fact that children grow up in undesirable surroundings and have parents that have been conditioned by the same type of environment.

The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness and low self-esteem interact to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin.

The poor don't live in functional market economies as the rest of us do, but in political economies where corruption and broken systems extend from local government to moneylenders.

I've been around low-income people all of my life. I mean, growing up, low income, the community where I've chosen to live, low-income.

I grew up in a socialist country. And I have seen what that does to people. There is no hope, no freedom. No pride in achievement.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and makes some virtues impracticable and others extremely difficult.

Poverty is the mother of crime.

A young man who does not have what it takes to perform military service is not likely to have what it takes to make a living. Today's military rejects include tomorrow's hard-core unemployed.

I spent a fair amount of time in Communist Poland when I was young - my wife was from there - and I had the impression that boredom was one of the things that was undermining that whole society from the inside.

Like every country, North Korea has some very smart people. They could be contributing a lot more to science and other areas, but North Koreans are forced to spend so much time memorising the fake history of our dictators and other propaganda, so are at a huge disadvantage.

Does anybody really think that they didn't get what they had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment?

Remember, the man who is poor is not the man that has no money, but one without a dream. They are suffering that have no dream. They are poor that have no dream.

People who had been treated inhumanly, not given a chance to secure any foot on any ladder - and all the social mores were suddenly abandoned.

You know, some people got no choice, and they can never find a voice, to talk with that they can even call their own. So the first thing that they see, that allows them the right to be, why they follow it, you know, it's called bad luck.

What's popular in places considered ghettos - whether that's the inner city or Appalachia - is having a decent quality of life.

The 2011 riots in England, which left five dead and caused more than $300 million in property damage, were fueled by a generation of young Brits who grew up without ever hearing the word 'No.'

In Chicago, a lot of people don't really got nothing to live for. Everybody can't ball. Everybody can't rap. Nobody is really doing those activities. There's nothing to do but the streets.

So many of my relatives didn't get a chance to go to school, and my own Daddy couldn't read or write.

Young people who have no future will easily give up their future, which they can't see on the horizon.

Now if you are condemned to life on welfare, I'm not so sure that being in a bigger welfare village is that much better than being in a smaller welfare village.

Anyone who has lived in an area with high unemployment knows how it erodes social bonds, lowers the resilience of the unemployed and their families, and damages the prospects of the next generation.