Cordae Quotes

I grew up in Kentucky, but I did not grow up like that. I had heat, and I didn't have to shoot my dinner or anything.

The difference between rich and poor is becoming more extreme, and as income inequality widens the wealth gap in major nations, education, health and social mobility are all threatened.

My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a very poor family. From Sicilian origin, I was the first person in my family to complete high school, let alone go to college.

I've been with all walks of life... All people from all status.

My basic position is that the more mixed the society and the more mobility there is in it, the better. That's what makes things interesting. When you get a homogenous society, it's very, very dull, whether that's all working class or all upper class, because everybody thinks the same, everybody looks the same.

There seems to be an idea abroad in this land as well as in others, that a certain class of people are for the purpose of producing servants for another class of people, and that this servant-producing class has no right to give their children an education that is calculated to elevate them above the position of their parents. We are not in sympathy with this idea.

If Eleanor Roosevelt has her way, how are we going to tell the rich from the poor?

As income inequality increases, social mobility falls.

In this respect, higher education is now causing most of the growing inequality and strengthening class structure of the United States.

The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it’s not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent.

A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have something equivalent in an additional decade.

These institutions are generally more skilled at getting rich off those living in the lower economic reaches than they are in preparing them for the job market.

With industrialization the gulf between the employed and the employer is growing wider; social contrasts are becoming sharper—as liveried carriages appear, so do barefoot children.

The fry of wandering beggars that grow up idly and hurtfully and burdenous to the Realm, might be unladen and better bred up.

Surrounded by the evidence of their success, the wealthy come to believe that they are fundamentally better than other Americans and that working people deserve their declining fortunes. They trumpet meritocracy while ensuring that their children enjoy crushing advantages from birth. They have unprecedented access to politicians and use it to push policies that swell their wealth while defunding institutions, such as public education, that sustain opportunities for less-fortunate Americans.

For every challenge we face - unemployment, poverty, crime, income growth, income inequality, productivity, competitiveness - a great education is a major component of the solution.

There is no reason why a nation as rich as ours should be blighted by poverty, disease, and illiteracy.

The fact is, working stiffs with few opportunities and scant education are generally too busy getting by to engage in revolutionary projects to remake society. And history, in fact, shows us that terrorism is generally a bourgeois endeavor.

We see that in the top problems in the world between haves and have-nots, generally we find that the root cause is education.

The people who talk about the middle class aren't upholding their interests in the legislature.

I grew up in poverty on the edge of a golf course. I saw how people lived on the other side of the tracks, the upper crust and the WASPs at the country club. We had chickens and pigs in our yards. We butchered every year. I'll never forget those things.

I started school in public housing. My dad had a sixth-grade education.

It wasn't as if I was simply some guy who had never seen the other side of the tracks.

You're not going to have something set on a council estate that explores all elements of human existence, the variety of experience inherent in any community.

My mother was the daughter of a poor schoolteacher - well, that's a tautology - a country schoolteacher.