Madam C. J. Walker Quotes

It is not easy for men to rise whose qualities are thwarted by poverty.

I don't come from a privileged background.

When you come from an under-privileged background, oftentimes, you feel a little overwhelmed by your education or your lack of.

I wanted to raise the voice of a lot of the people that I knew growing up, and this was, for the most part, poor people who had extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles.

A lot of people have no access to beauty. When I was growing up, my mother had only a few pretty things to look at.

The great doctors all got their education off dirt pavements and poverty - not marble floors and foundations.

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

You don't have to be impoverished to understand poverty.

If you don't have money or you come from a background that doesn't have money, it's harder to achieve your ambition in life. It's not that you can't, but it becomes harder. Inequality is one of the worst things that can exist in our society, so I am interested in those kind of things.

I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth.

It's hard to get people to empathize with the poor. You can get some people to sympathize with the poor, but to empathize is actually very hard, because most people are not poor. I realized that scarcity gives you a thread.

I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people.

I grew up in an underprivileged home.

Poverty can teach lessons that privilege cannot.

I came from poverty and was part of those circumstances.

I never came into life with any favours or privileges.

I come from a poor family.

Poverty and lack of knowledge must be challenged.

I grew up poor.

I was born on the other side of the tracks, in public housing in Brooklyn, New York. My dad never made more than $20,000 a year, and I grew up in a family that lost health insurance. So I was scarred at a young age with understanding what it was like to watch my parents lose access to the American dream.

The economic dimension is very clear. I was at a dinner party, a mother got up, who's a very distinguished scientist, and said she had to get home and help her daughter with her homework. The two waiters, their faces changed. They were working their second jobs, they couldn't get home to help their kids with homework.

Poverty is often off the beaten track. It always has been.

Poverty is ever an inbred growth

People who are underprivileged have more to grieve and have more to overcome.

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?