Brent Weeks Quotes

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

As a senior at Princeton, I felt like the whole world was open to me. In our country, that's not a given. We aspire to be a place of equal opportunity, and yet where you're born determines your prospects.

The latitude and longitudinal lines of where you are born determine your opportunity in life, and it's not equal. We may have been created equal, but we're not born equal. It's a lot to do with luck and you have to pass that on.

Everybody is not born with a silver spoon in their mouth. There are only a very small percentage of those types of people, you know what I mean?

Barriers today are largely class-based - income, networks, education. And those affect many white people as well.

I was not born into a rich family or a family of government officials.

Class still matters in Britain today.

What family you were born into matters so much more than it did before in a perverse way.

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

Mitt Romney subscribes to the cynical logic that says the American dream belongs to some of us but not all of us.

Over time, my students have gotten richer and more educated.

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?

My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.

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.

The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible.

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

Freedom breeds inequality.

For two years, I'd lived in Silicon Valley, surrounded by other highly educated transplants with seemingly perfect lives. It's jarring to live in a world where every person feels his life will only get better when you came from a world where many rightfully believe that things have become worse.

It's kind of almost not fair that certain people don't get the opportunities that others get just because of where they are born or where they were brought up.

There's not enough opportunity, and I feel like you can't control where you're born or where you're brought up.

The idea that there is a meritocracy where anyone from any background really might have the social and economic mobility to rise to the top in Silicon Valley, those are antithetical to a lot of the principles that the Trump administration apparently stands for.

I never really grew up being political or Labour. It was just a realisation that where you were born mattered. That how you spoke mattered... who you knew mattered.

Inequality is partly a marker of success.

I think that I represent people that sometimes don't have a voice because of how they grew up or where they grew up or the options that were given to them. I was able to kick my way out of that, but we have a real class problem in this country, where it's hard to jump classes.

I think class is still an issue in this country.