Jessica Barden Quotes

We aspire to be equal opportunity, but all across the country where a student is born, their race, their class affect where they end up.

There's a huge gulf between people who can afford to go to drama school and those who can't.

I grew up in leafy suburbs in north and east Belfast, but if I had been born a mile down the road closer to the city centre, you might never heard of me.

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?

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? … Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.

Some men will be always able to pay more for their children's education than others; and that those children will, inevitably, win in the struggle of life.

Education is important. And the difference of the zip code you grow up in or the zip code you are born in and how you turn out really isn't fair to the kids of our world.

We need to find ways to elevate the expectations, particularly of those individuals who may start off on a lower socioeconomic rung, who might be seen as disadvantaged. But, you know, the reason I say be seen as disadvantaged, it's because life is so short, and there's so much that can change.

The want of education and moral training is the only real barrier that exists between the different classes of men.

If you are born into poverty, the chances are good that your children will be born into poverty. Find a way to give poor kids the same cognitive stimulus that rich kids receive, and they should end up with the same tools for success.

I'm aware that not all kids can pick up and fly to Panama. I'm very lucky.

For students today, only 10 percent of children from working-class families graduate from college by the age of 24 as compared to 58 percent of upper-middle-class and wealthy families.

There is definitely places in America where, if you're born into that environment, your chances of getting out are really, really limited.

There's a lot of potential that goes unused in places like South Central L.A., a lot of brilliant, smart people who just don't have that chance to show it.

I think the class divide is going to change. I think a lot more working class people are going to get published. It is really class ridden, literature.

I grew up in Brownsville; most of the kids I grew up with went to jail, not Yale. If they had heard of Yale, they thought it was a lock to pick.

Some kids win the lottery at birth; far too many don't - and most people have a hard time catching up over the rest of their lives. Children raised in disadvantaged environments are not only much less likely to succeed in school or in society, but they are also much less likely to be healthy adults.

It is harder for a poor man to be successful than it is for a rich man.

The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.

Better educated than wealthy

My kids never had the advantage I had: I was born poor.

Poor children fare worse than rich children on just about everything that social scientists measure.

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

In England, there is this tradition of the upper classes going to very expensive drama schools and then going on having careers. I knew that wasn't an option for me. My mother would never have been able to afford that.

If events had taken a different course, I could have been one of those children going to a school without the sorts of opportunities that I've subsequently had.