Idris Elba Quotes

I don't come from a privileged background.

They do not easily rise whose abilities are repressed by poverty at home.

I had little or no opportunity when I started out in life.

I wasn't a silver-spoon kid on the golf course growing up.

I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth.

Being poor is not an indication of potential or worth. It’s a lack of resources.

Poverty is not really as much of an obstacle to educational expansion as it's sometimes made out to be.

As a young man, I saw families prosper without reading because there were always sufficient opportunities for willing workers who could follow simple instructions. This is no longer the case. Children who don't read are, in the main, destined for lesser lives. I feel a deep sense of responsibility to change this.

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.

I remember being shocked when I discovered some of my school pals didn't have books in their homes. I thought it was like not having oxygen, or hot water.

People like me who grew up in a working-class town, who don't have a college education, you don't usually hear from us.

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.

Resentment — that feeling when the modern promise of equality collides with massive disparities of power, education, status and property ownership.

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

I am a middle-class black, a college professor, far from wealthy, but also well removed from the kind of deprivation that would qualify my children for the label 'disadvantaged.'

Kids born into certain ZIP codes will most likely have certain educational outcomes. And we've got to end that. If we end that, we explode economic development.

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?

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.

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.

I had never gone to college. I was not from a politically connected family. I had no money of my own. Who is going to do business with you?

I was brought up on a council estate. I know what it's like to be poor.

I was fortunate enough to make it to where I want to be. There could be other kids as talented or more talented than me in whatever they want to be but don't have the resources to pursue their dream. Maybe they have to get a job instead to help their mom with the bills.

Sometimes, when you grow up in one of these poverty-stricken neighborhoods where the educational system isn't the best, you don't realize that you have any choices.

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

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.