Muhammad Yunus Quotes

Let me ask you: Should only children of the wealthy have access to quality early education? Should only children of the wealthy have access to a college degree? The answer - the only answer - is: no.

Like grain in a time of famine, the immense resources which the nation does in fact possess go not to the child in the greatest need but to the children of the highest bidder-the child of parents who, more frequently than not, have also enjoyed the same abundance when they were schoolchildren.

The thing that really struck me when I went to junior high was class. I grew up on a pretty poor street, but the school district I was in included some fine neighborhoods - so I got to know a couple of the kids from those places and went to their houses and experienced such culture shock.

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.

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

Some liberals think that describing any role that education gaps play in creating income inequality is some sort of sellout - that, in essence, you're telling the middle class, 'Tough luck; you should have stayed in college.'

The trouble is not that schools don't work; they do. They're excellent machines for achieving historically accepted purposes. In suburban schools are children of the rich, who grow up to privilege and anesthetic oblivion to pain - and who then use the servants produced by ghetto schools.

As long as acquiring knowledge is the educational goal of schools, educational opportunities will be limited, as they are now, to affluent families.

The lack of diversity in higher education is a problem we as a country must tackle if we're going to live up to our promise.

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?

The gap between the rich and poor is widening fast.

If we do not provide education for every single American, we are consigning those without an education to second-class status.

I'm still a communist in the sense that I don't believe the world will survive with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer - I think that the pressures will get so tremendous that the social contract will just come apart.

In Colombia, education is sometimes considered a luxury, not a human right. And it's not a priority in the agendas of many leaders.

The logic is that when you provide schools or any social service to people, they have no choice. They have to take what you give them, because they don't have the money to pay for schools themselves; that's why you provide schools in the first place.

It is true, there was no public-school system, and the reason for it was very plain. The wealth of the upper classes enabled them to have private tutors.

Colleges and universities divide families by income, providing access to the best schools for those with accumulated wealth. Low- or moderate-income families are relegated to the less prestigious schools where the resources for advancement are fewer than those provided at better financed schools.

An imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

Better educated than wealthy

Oligarchy is to the advantage of the rich. Democracy to the advantage of the poor.

The rich are few everywhere, the poor many.

The public education system works for children of families like mine but it does not work for the children of families who I represent …

The rich have all the speech they want; the poor have lockjaw.

Tomorrow everybody--or practically everybody--will have had the education of the upper class of yesterday.

The people with high school degrees and the people who have college degrees are living in two different Americas.