Millard Drexler Quotes

We're leaving the House to people who either were born with a silver spoon in their mouth... or couldn't get better jobs in the first place.

In Britain, by contrast, we still think that class plays a part in determining a person's life chances, so we're less inclined to celebrate success and less inclined to condemn failure. The upshot is that it's much easier to be a failure in Britain than it is in America.

As a senior at Princeton, I felt like the whole world was open to me. In our country, that's not a given. We aspire to be a place of equal opportunity, and yet where you're born determines your prospects.

My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.

Early admission programs tend to advantage the advantaged.

You can be born into privilege, or you can not be born into privilege. You can be born into the opposite extreme and into poverty. I think from there on, though, you really do have to make your luck.

Everybody is not born with a silver spoon in their mouth. There are only a very small percentage of those types of people, you know what I mean?

I wish that positions of power dependent on education were as open to abused children, poor children, working-class children as they are to the children of the rich and successful. I really wish that were true.

The idea that there is a meritocracy where anyone from any background really might have the social and economic mobility to rise to the top in Silicon Valley, those are antithetical to a lot of the principles that the Trump administration apparently stands for.

The opportunity I had growing up in Montana isn't the opportunities for a whole lot of people.

I never really grew up being political or Labour. It was just a realisation that where you were born mattered. That how you spoke mattered... who you knew mattered.

We come from different backgrounds. Some people grow up with money in their pocket, or they have a certain last name; others have nothing. But it comes down to work ethic. That's where we all play on the same playing field.

The thing is with boxers we don't come from Cambridge and places like that, we come from council estates. So in boxing it's very, very hard.

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.

It says anybody can make it, because we're all on a level playing field. But we're not on a level playing field. That 's precisely the point, and that's what the rich don't want to look at. They don't want to recognize that they're not producing wealth at all. They're hoarding wealth. That's different.

According to bourgeois standards, those who are completely unlucky and unsuccessful are automatically barred from competition, which is the life of society. Good fortune is identified with honor, and bad luck with shame.

The world is not a meritocracy, as much as we may like to pretend that it is. And we have a long way to go before we really reward people based on their own merit.

You have never been poor, and never known what ambition is.

Little by little, the U.S. has allowed questionable domestic policies to chip away at the only hope poor students have at a better future. The Right Wing loves to distract voters from these realities by making it seem as though the poor remain so because they lack the work ethic necessary to 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps.'

It's kind of almost not fair that certain people don't get the opportunities that others get just because of where they are born or where they were brought up.

I'm from a working-class background - I had free school meals all my life and then spent six years in art school.

I'm not exceptional. I didn't grow up with privilege.

Everyone asks me how to get into television. Ultimately, you have to work for free for years. As much as we enthuse about diversity, we are never going to be truly diverse because the system means only a certain section of society can do that.

I don't have the privilege of choice to say, 'I want to work with you,' and the person will say, 'Yes, come on, I will write a film for you.' It doesn't happen for people like me who come from the outside.

I always have that in the back of my head - the idea that I've been spoon-fed because of where I'm from. I think that's one of the main things that drives me to work harder to show that, in reality, I haven't been handed anything.