Jay-Z Quotes

Choice dependent on wealth; those are the Tory words.

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.

Aspiration, it seems, is in danger of becoming the preserve of the wealthy.

There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different - from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one.

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.

I'm tired of people on trust funds telling people on food stamps how to live.

The one think I hate about rich people, is that they really think that they work harder than poor people.

It is easy to say that there are the rich and the poor, and so something should be done. But in history, there are always the rich and the poor. If the poor were not as poor, we would still call them the poor. I mean, whoever has less can be called the poor. You will always have the 10% that have less and the 10% that have the most.

I did not have a car in high school and neither did Angelina. Try to imagine. You go to Beverly Hills High, one of the wealthiest high schools in the nation. Even the cheapest car that anyone has is brand new. All my friends are well off. I have a movie-star father and no car. It was debilitating.

You have to be very poor and desperate, or very rich, or lucky, to live in Islington. We don't have the people in the middle, the people who serve the community.

The chasm between rich and poor is becoming larger, and I think it's interesting terrain to talk about and expose.

Growing up on, say, the Upper East Side, you're so isolated. If you go to the Hamptons every weekend, you never talk to a construction worker, and the construction worker would never talk to you.

As public schools deteriorate, the upper-middle class and wealthy send their kids to private ones. As public pools and playgrounds decay, the better-off buy memberships in private tennis and swimming clubs. As public hospitals decline, the well-off pay premium rates for private care.

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.

Texas has arguably the most extreme separation between the well off and everyday people in the United States.

As the rich consume more and more, they are clearly not going to want to downgrade their own status.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

I have a feeling that life as a billionaire in Silicon Valley is very different than the life that you or I would lead. Unless you're a billionaire; I don't know your financial situation.

Class - or the economic status of individuals - is evident in all societies, some very well stratified by a rigid caste system determined by birth.

At the end of the day, we have an economy that works for the rich by cheating the poor, and unequal schools are the result of that, not the cause.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case.

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.

The rich are richer, and the poor are poorer, in the city than elsewhere; and, as a rule, the greater are the riches of the rich and the poverty of the poor.

To be clear, the gap between the have gots and the have nots is widening. In this most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic America ever, that concerns me.