Condoleezza Rice Quotes

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.

For too long, we financed our schools in a way that has systematically left large segments of our population behind.

Schools are not equal. There are still the haves and the have-nots.

Some kids win the lottery at birth; far too many don't - and most people have a hard time catching up over the rest of their lives. Children raised in disadvantaged environments are not only much less likely to succeed in school or in society, but they are also much less likely to be healthy adults.

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.

Some men will be always able to pay more for their children's education than others; and that those children will, inevitably, win in the struggle of life.

It is not fair that some people should have a better chance in life simply because of where they live.

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.

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.

Kids born into certain ZIP codes will most likely have certain educational outcomes. And we've got to end that. If we end that, we explode economic development.

Millennials easily connect the dots between good education and good opportunities, and they also understand that it isn't just hard work that determines how well a child will be educated - it also depends on where they live and the resources their parents commit to their education.

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.

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

A human born somewhere in this world doesn't have the same chances as another one born in Paris, England, or the U.S. We don't have the same chances at the beginning.

No child's future should ever be dictated by what zip code they were born in.

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.

Kids who are middle class, socioeconomically, are surrounded by mentors. They have coaches, teachers, they have family friends, their parents have friends. They might have opportunities, they might have jobs that allow them to experience things that kids in poverty often don't have. Sometimes they come from dysfunctional families. And when you come from a family where money's a real challenge, then it might not be a priority to get you into a summer internship.

The private schools and the independent schools like Oprah's are really doing well because they've got the best of everything but it certainly puts the spotlight on a system of public education that is still reeling from the apartheid years [in South Africa].

I think it sucks that in our country [the USA] there is such a double standard education-wise. Which part of the city you live in, or something like that, determines if you'll be successful, and that's not fair.

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

Sometimes, when you grow up in one of these poverty-stricken neighborhoods where the educational system isn't the best, you don't realize that you have any choices.

Different people are afforded different opportunities. I've been given some awesome opportunities, and I feel that I've always knocked them out of the park. But I've always been scaled back after that.

If you happened to be born on third base, you didn't rub it in the face of the guy who wasn't even born in the stadium. Self-interest was generally checked at the door with your coat and hat.

Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do.

Every man was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth.