Nicholas Kristof Quotes

The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible.

We aspire to be equal opportunity, but all across the country where a student is born, their race, their class affect where they end up.

America's 'social contract' is equal opportunity... yet we have failed in achieving that seminal goal.

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.

America shortchanges half its youth, the half that doesn't go to college.

Public education is the great equalizer of America.

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

You’re twice as likely to realize the American Dream if you’re growing up in Canada rather than the U.S.

When you don't have equality of opportunity because you don't have equal access to education, it just seems so outrageous. It weakens our economy and leads to more inequality.

We remain a country where a young person's chance of fulfilling their potential rests on the vagaries of where they were born and what their parents do, rather than their innate talent and ambition.

America is not another word for Opportunity to all her sons.

I am but a generation removed from poverty and despair. Where would I be today if there had never been an America? What kind of lives or future would my children have if this was not a land of opportunity?

Government doesn't have to be the enemy, but too much government has produced a new kind of inequality in America: opportunity inequality.

Let's say you work at a university or a college. You are a cog in the one of the great inequality producing machines this country has known.

Only 28 percent of American adults have a college degree, but most of us in this group find ourselves in workplaces in social milieus where almost everybody has been to college. A social chasm is opening up between those in educated society and those in non-educated society, and you are beginning to see vast behavioral differences between the two groups.

We once had a society stratified by bloodlines, in which the Protestant Establishment was in one class, immigrants were in another and African-Americans were in another. Now we live in a society stratified by education. In many ways this system is more fair, but as the information economy matures, we are learning it comes with its own brutal barriers to opportunity and ascent.

We know what works. What works are the very opportunities that advantaged families provide for their children.

… there is inherent in the dynamics of capitalism a natural and destabilizing tendency toward inequality of income, wealth and opportunity.

If you want the American Dream, go to Finland.

Public education is our greatest pathway to opportunity in America. So we need to invest in and strengthen our public universities today, and for generations to come.

Education is important. And the difference of the zip code you grow up in or the zip code you are born in and how you turn out really isn't fair to the kids of our world.

I think it goes back to whether or not race and class - that is, race and poverty - is not becoming even more of a constraint. Because with the failing public schools, I worry that the way that my grandparents got out of poverty, the way that my parents became educated, is just not going to be there for a whole bunch of kids.

I didn't grow up with a lot of money, but I grew up with a lot of opportunities that many people don't have.

If events had taken a different course, I could have been one of those children going to a school without the sorts of opportunities that I've subsequently had.

I've seen a lot of poverty - coming up as a young child, lost hopes and dreams and people that never had a chance to have a decent quality of life. I believe we can do a lot greater than that.