Kemba Walker Quotes

My perspective is never gonna change on that... We've got to do a much better job to take care of poor people, because you cannot put all the poor people in bad neighborhoods, send them to bad schools, and say, 'Good luck in life.' That's just not right.

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.

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

I've seen a lot of poverty - coming up as a young child, lost hopes and dreams and people that never had a chance to have a decent quality of life. I believe we can do a lot greater than that.

Although I was born into the America that experiences and believes in opportunity, my trips to Ferguson, Detroit, Atlanta, and Chicago have revealed that there is an undercurrent of unease.

You grow up in America and you're told from day one, 'This is the land of opportunity.' That everybody has an equal chance to make it in this country. And then you look at places like Harlem, and you say, 'That is absolutely a lie.'

We are also further than ever from equality of opportunity.

Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.

I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.

I've lived places these guys can't defecate in.

We know that in our free market economy some will prosper more than others. What we don't accept is the idea that some folks won't even get a chance.

I started out young and idealistic, and it was all about social justice and fair distribution of resources. I didn't understand why everybody couldn't be equally prosperous.

America's 'social contract' is equal opportunity... yet we have failed in achieving that seminal goal.

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

It might be that my poverty is my fault—the result of my ineptitude or my laziness. However, is there any way that the poverty that my child is condemned to is his fault? He certainly does not have the same opportunity as my child would if I were rich. But where then is our equality of opportunity?

I know of only three ways of living in society: one must be a beggar, a thief, or a wage earner.

Equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists… we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already”

For too long, we've attached some mythic notion to government solutions, and yet, 40 years after we began the War on Poverty, poverty still abounds.

Why should I leave Ruleville, and why should I leave Mississippi? I go to the big city, and with the kind of education they give us in Mississippi, I got problems. I'd wind up in a soup line there.

For too many, the shot for a brighter future is simply out of reach.

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.

There is no excuse for inaction in the face of economic injustice.

I became conscious in later life that I had been given an education that enabled me to do all kinds of jobs, but often, jobs weren't open to me.

I like to make films about how people survive living in the United States.

There are patches in the GRC that are actually full of low-income people... and we cannot leave them behind in our pursuit of economic development and success.