Gunter Grass Quotes

A child's geographic location, race or parent's income level should not predetermine their life's course and it's up to us to see that they don't.

There's not a whole bunch of options in America for a black man. But sports gives you that opportunity... So where would my life be without football? I don't know.

You have young men of color in many communities who are more likely to end up in jail or in the criminal justice system than they are in a good job or in college. And, you know, part of my job, that I can do, I think, without any potential conflicts, is to get at those root causes.

We live in a very unequal society.

I think race is very important. I think generally speaking, we've to face the general problem, which is that we are seeing more children coming out of families which simply don't give them adequate resources for their development.

There are contradictory tendencies in American society. There's a huge range of activities that one can engage in that mark it as a quite free society. It's also true to say that the powers that be have so much control over how people think that there are fewer and fewer people who make use of the rights and information available to them.

We have to improve life, not just for those who have the most skills and those who know how to manipulate the system. But also for and with those who often have so much to give but never get the opportunity.

You have little representation of young black men in the business sector, so you have children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods who don't hear discussions at the dinner table about what goes on in business. It's almost as if we have two nations.

Everybody needs history but the people who need it most are poor folks - people without resources or options.

What gets in our way is history and culture and religion and economic conditions. It is part of the hypnosis of our social conditioning.

Public action should seek to expand the set of opportunities of those who have the least voice and fewest resources and capabilities.

As you would expect when individualism is based only on opportunity, no one asks what happens to those who have neither the financial nor the political clout to exercise their tiny portion of that opportunity.

They do not easily rise whose abilities are repressed by poverty at home.

In such a colony, the highest capacities of mind and heart, which, as every unprejudiced observer will confess, can readily be discovered in a large number of individuals of our nation, would be sooner and more rapidly developed than our present social life admits of, where so many circumstances unite to stifle the most splendid, most promising natural abilities in the bud.

The more you improve the condition of these people, the more you cultivate their minds, the more miserable you make them in their present state.

You know, women not making dollar for dollar the same as a man is not new. It's been that way since day zero, since the founding of this country. And when you put African-American women and Hispanic women into the mix it's even worse than that.

The breadth of work that's possible is wider and deeper for someone who looks like me in the States than it is in the U.K.

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.

The values of the Left cripple human beings, weaken cities, make it difficult for us to in fact survive as a country.

My real passion is social justice, resolving the lack of empowerment, the lack of skills, the fact that young people can't get on the housing ladder, they feel they can't have a decent job, they feel they aren't in control of their lives.

Barriers today are largely class-based - income, networks, education. And those affect many white people as well.

American computer science grads often have very little exposure to the human condition. They've rarely had manual labor or service jobs. They grow up in a bubble of privilege lulled into thinking this country is a true meritocracy.

I come from the ghetto in Brazil, where we don't have a lot of career opportunities, so I'm sure my family and people who live there never imagined that one day I'd become a singer and be able to perform at an event like the Olympics.

All countries have poor people. Yet it's a very rare country which understands the indignities of poverty, while education systems maintain the status quo. The children of the elite go to the best schools and get the best jobs, not because they are the best. We're not taking advantage of the intellectual power on this planet.

Especially in black communities, we've been so groomed to stay where we are and not like people in the other neighborhoods. It's crazy. It won't allow people to experience life and see what the world truly has to offer. People are stuck in their ways, stuck in their communities, stuck on their streets.