Gloria Trevi Quotes

Better educated than wealthy

The benefit of rich families putting their child through Harvard is always going to exist. But it's quite evident that there are 700 million peasants in China who are never going to go to Harvard.

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

It is actually getting much harder for someone from an ordinary background to break through the ranks. In the period from 1964 to 1997, every single Prime Minister - from Harold Wilson to John Major - was the product of a state school.

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

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

Less than one percent of U.S. college students attend Ivy League schools, and these students don't necessarily reflect the world's brightest and most capable thought leaders but, rather, the people who've been afforded the most opportunities to succeed.

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 says anybody can make it, because we're all on a level playing field. But we're not on a level playing field. That 's precisely the point, and that's what the rich don't want to look at. They don't want to recognize that they're not producing wealth at all. They're hoarding wealth. That's different.

America has tolerated inequality because people think they can get ahead. If you have immobility on top of inequality, then people are not going to be happy campers. If you're stuck on the bottom and there just isn't much churning in society and you're stuck there through your adulthood, that's not a nice life to look forward to.

It's like high school holds two different worlds, revolving around each other an never touching; the haves and the have-nots. I guess it's a good thing. High school is supposed to prepare you for the real world, after all.

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.

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.

I was very much a product of the public-school system. There was only one other kid in my class who had parents not involved in the stock market or law.

In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.

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 have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.

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.

Everything in America is so stratified by class now. We have the 93rd level of income inequality in the world. You're already seeing highway lanes that are for pay and ones that aren'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.

The Sixties was a time of breaking down class barriers, although I think class still exists today in some areas.

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.

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.

There are huge divorces and divides and chasms in black America between the have-gots and the have-nots, between the monied and the poor, between the educated and the non-educated. And there are huge and growing chasms daily. And I want to say that it's not simply about generation. It's about genre.

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.