Lecrae Quotes

It might be that my poverty is my fault—the result of my ineptitude or my laziness. However, is there any way that the poverty that my child is condemned to is his fault? He certainly does not have the same opportunity as my child would if I were rich. But where then is our equality of opportunity?

The great mass of the poor in countries are become an hereditary race, and it is next to impossible them to get out of that state of themselves

… perceptions of poverty have gone up because there’s been rising inequality.

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.

Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.

There's great disparity between who goes to college and who goes to jail. Who lives long and who dies prematurely, is the defining issue of our time. And I submit to you, there's a significant race dimension, it is basically class-driven.

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

The ability to take advantage of freedom and democracy is proportional to the size of your bank account.

Today, if you were raised poor, you're just as likely to stay poor as you were 50 years ago.

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.

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.

the possession of wealth, and especially the inheritance of wealth, seems almost invariably to sterilize genius.

There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

Choice dependent on wealth; those are the Tory words.

The odds of being successful are the same for every group that is educated in America. It's just that the group that is not wealthy is 95 percent of the population. So if there are 100 successful people in a room, probably 95 out of 100 came from more modest means.

I didn't necessarily grow up in a trailer park, but there is a brief part of that in my life. So I can make fun of it a little bit. I'm not too much of an outsider, where I'm just making fun of someone.

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

If you have extremes of haves and have-nots where the gap keeps growing, the have-nots group together and create social disorder, as they can't see a way out of their situation.

The American dream is dead for the majority of America.

One of the strangest things about life is that the poor, who need the money the most, are the ones that never have it.

We all stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. We're in a relay race, relying on the financial and human capital of our parents and grandparents. Blacks were shackled for the early part of that relay race, and although many of the fetters have come off, whites have developed a huge lead.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

The perennial conviction that those who work hard and play by the rules will be rewarded with a more comfortable present and a stronger future for their children faces assault from just about every direction. That great enemy of democratic capitalism, economic inequality, is real and growing.

I don't think it's good for people to be born into money and not know what it is never to have it.