Abhijit Banerjee Quotes

I was in the heart and soul of Baltimore. I definitely felt a connection to the people. They're really hard-working people that want to have a better life. And I saw the struggle that exists there.

I wanted to raise the voice of a lot of the people that I knew growing up, and this was, for the most part, poor people who had extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles.

I don't come from a privileged background.

Growing up in New Orleans and just being in a poverty-stricken neighborhood gave me that same fire that Eazy had to separate himself from what could have ended up being such a bad situation.

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, so there was always a sense of struggle, but we had hope.

My father was raised in an orphanage, and my mother was an immigrant from Poland whose first childhood memory was of hunger. Somehow, despite all of that, I am called a member of the 'elite.' If so, I damned well earned it.

As I wrote about my childhood, I realized that there was no big tragedy. Being multiethnic is not a tragedy. I didn't have any big life-threatening illnesses, no tumors, no kidney malfunctions... I came from a very poor family. I was chubby as a kid.

I grew up really poor and have always been the type of person who will work earlier or work harder or more than the other person to even the playing field.

When you grow up on the other side of the tracks, you're used to taking a few bumps.

If you don't have money or you come from a background that doesn't have money, it's harder to achieve your ambition in life. It's not that you can't, but it becomes harder. Inequality is one of the worst things that can exist in our society, so I am interested in those kind of things.

I grew up poor. The fact that I had to struggle to succeed, that wasn't a big deal to me. I'd struggled my whole life.

The ‘poor white’ is actually degraded; the mountain white is a person not yet graded up.

I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood. We just knew the rule was you're going to have to work twice as hard.

Too much is made for us; too much is given to us - even those of us who are underprivileged. The poverty is given to us. The difficulties are given to us.

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.

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.

I left college with a deep sense that I needed to understand poverty more.

Nobody talks about the poor. Everybody talks about the middle class and just kinda want to ignore that the poor exist. And you cannot ignore that they exist if you want to help them.

Being exposed to the enlisted Army was an eye-opener. I thought everyone was like me, but the enlisted Army is a constituency of the dispossessed.

My family wasn't involved in the college. They were more of just your 'white trash' kind of family. And so I have that kind of background, but I always kind of aspired to be something else, and I made a lot of different friends over the years that were passing through.

Labour ministers often look puzzled when reports show that Britain has one of the lowest levels of social mobility in the developed world. They just don't get it. They see poverty, inequality, fairness, as all about income. For the past 12 years, they have relied on tax credits to solve this. But tax credits do not solve poverty: they mask it.

Long before I achieved financial success and became the subject of a Hollywood film, I was a veteran, a single father, and a working person who was homeless.

In Britain, when the working class are summoned for fiction, it's 'isn't it a shame, isn't it a pity, isn't it awful, the terribly poor things... ' whereas from within, it's nothing like that. It's fantastic, it's glamorous, it's terrible and good the same as it is for everybody.

Politicians seem desperate to appeal to their respective versions of the so called 'middle class,' unable to empathise with the precariat and eager to dream up fresh and tougher sanctions against society's wounded.

There are prime examples - me, Natasha Jonas, Tony Bellew, Toni Duggan - who have come from areas around Liverpool that haven't been the wealthiest. But we've also been determined to get out and then to give back.