Jenna Bush Quotes

The benefit of rich families putting their child through Harvard is always going to exist. But it's quite evident that there are 700 million peasants in China who are never going to go to Harvard.

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.

Who is more in touch with the problems of this country? One of those guys who goes off to Oxford or to University of Yale, or someone who has lived in buses, in the Metro, in the street?

Better educated than wealthy

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.

All of us kids in the neighbourhood had to go shoeless for the same reason - all except the landlord's son, because his father had more income.

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

I was very much a product of the public-school system. There was only one other kid in my class who had parents not involved in the stock market or law.

Class still matters in Britain today.

What family you were born into matters so much more than it did before in a perverse way.

I don't come from a privileged background.

I'm ashamed to say that I'm from a very privileged background.

If everybody lives in the same way, there's something almost narcotizing about it, but the true misery of economic class difference is knowing that you can't have what somebody else does.

I didn't grow up with great privilege, nor did I grow up wanting for anything. I was a middle-class kid and, relative to the rest of the world, that's great wealth.

My job requires me to put on a little dress and run around the streets of New York in heels. But I also had the financial means to hire a yoga teacher to come to my house while my sitter watched the newborn. For 95 percent of the world, that's not realistic.

People say law but they mean wealth.

All Reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.

The competition of the poor takes away from the reward of the rich.

We know what works. What works are the very opportunities that advantaged families provide for their children.

The inequality that exists today, … derives less from the unequal availability of opportunity than from the unequal ability to exploit opportunity …

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

Freedom breeds inequality.

For two years, I'd lived in Silicon Valley, surrounded by other highly educated transplants with seemingly perfect lives. It's jarring to live in a world where every person feels his life will only get better when you came from a world where many rightfully believe that things have become worse.

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.

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?