Sonia Sotomayor Quotes

Since my retirement, I've spent a lot of time trying to help the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina. A society like this just can't afford an uneducated underclass of citizens.

The difficulty is, Pell Grants are an attempt to do the right thing, and that is to give the low-income student an opportunity to access higher education, and that's a good thing. And welfare was an attempt to help those most in need. The difficulty is, often times a program is so successful that it grows and grows and grows and grows.

I graduated from Bowdoin College and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Then I left and took a job teaching really poor inner-city white kids in Boston. It was interesting to me because I'd never been around poor whites before.

This College system went into practice to draw a line of demarcation between the two classes of society—it separated the children of the rich from the children of the poor.

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.

There are people with no high school education who are poor. but there are also university graduates on food bank lines. There are people who are poor because they have made bad choices, gotten addicted to drugs, burned bridges with friends and family — and then there are people who have never taken a drug in their lives, who have huge social networks, and who still can’t make ends meet.

These institutions are generally more skilled at getting rich off those living in the lower economic reaches than they are in preparing them for the job market.

We must bring it to pass ... if we have the peace that all the youth now in England, born of free men who have the means that they can apply to it, may be devoted to learning ... until such time as they can read well what is written in England.

Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.

Voting rights and free speech are of little value to those with neither the education nor economic clout to make them meaningful.

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

It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand ... no method by which the communities could translate their desires for those individuals into provision for those individuals.

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.

Because of the British Welfare State …, I was never hungry…. The schools I attended were free and actually acted as ladders of mobility for those randomly given the skills in the genetic lottery of life to climb them.

I do not feel that, in these important years, girls should be chosen for college purely on the basis of whether they can afford to pay for this opportunity. They should be there because of the potential value which they will bring to the Nation. If they have this added training, the Nation should be willing to put something toward their development.

T]he criminalization of simple possession of marijuana has resulted in increased prison populations, devastating racial disparities and a lost generation of people with no education and no job prospects because of an arrest that haunts them for the rest of their lives...

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.

For many children, the library represents their only access to books, reading, and the Internet outside of their home. If you think about how far behind a child would be without access to these fundamental tools - tools that are vital to successful employment later in life - it's a travesty.

My dad got a job as a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. He teaches biology and genetics. My dad has been obsessed with science his whole life. Both my paternal grandparents were illiterate bamboo farmers, so he really worked his way up and then got a Ph.D., full ride and everything, from universities in America.

The fact is, working stiffs with few opportunities and scant education are generally too busy getting by to engage in revolutionary projects to remake society. And history, in fact, shows us that terrorism is generally a bourgeois endeavor.

I'm a beneficiary of an extraordinary education, and I believe that no matter where you live, the access to education is key to social mobility.

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.

We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.

While 'The Wire' feels startlingly lifelike, it is not, in fact, a naturalistic depiction of ghetto life. That kind of realism better describes an earlier miniseries of Simon's, 'The Corner,' which was based on the book of the same title that he and Ed Burns wrote, set in the same Baltimore ghetto.

I grew up in a middle-class family. I went to law school.