Lupe Fiasco Quotes

It’s scandalous when one thinks about the people who live in a world in which they need not be hungry, in which they need not die without medical care, in which they need not be illiterate, they need not feel hopeless and miserable so much of the time, and yet they are.

I think that deep in our hearts we know that our comforts, our conveniences are at the expense of other people.

I think having a good life prompts it... anybody who has a good life and looks around them sees the enormous disparity that exists in the world between those people who do and those that don't. I can't say we walk about our guilt a lot, though. If we do, it probably comes out in the form of self-loathing jokes. But it's a tough thing to wrap your head around... the have's and have not's in the world.

I firmly believe that talent and intelligence are universal, but resources and opportunities are not.

We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.

If you’re in the luckiest one per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.

I'm not one of these people who thinks everyone born into privilege should wear sack cloth and ashes. But it's something I wrestle with. I know a lot of people who live below the poverty level and have for a long time and it makes them uneasy to think they'll have to interact with people from different economic levels. Everyone has some sort of load put on them, whatever the circumstances they're born into.

Living in Portland, which is a predominantly white city, the privilege and the luxury to be able to obsess over a certain kind of minutia, that I think, if you did not have that privilege, would never be bothersome. When people are worried about whether "local" means 100 miles, or 50 miles, or 10 miles from a grocery store, I just think, "Wow. What a privilege it is to have that as a major concern in your life." As opposed to, "Can we afford food tonight?" Sometimes I'm just shocked at what becomes concerning in these kind of communities.

We live increasingly in a world of haves and have-nots, of gated communities next to ghettos, of extreme poverty and unbelievable riches. Some enjoy rights that are completely denied to others. Relative inequalities are exploding, and the world's poorest, despite all the advances of globalisation, may even be getting poorer.

What I worry about is the lack of understanding in society around the world that there is a divide in the world between those who have and those who do not.

It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have nothing.

If everybody lives in the same way, there's something almost narcotizing about it, but the true misery of economic class difference is knowing that you can't have what somebody else does.

Compared to people in Africa, I think we've all had privileged upbringings.

To be clear, the gap between the have gots and the have nots is widening. In this most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic America ever, that concerns me.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

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.

One of the biggest challenges facing the globe is the gap that exists in the wealth and standards of living enjoyed by the world's nations.

The prime culprit in causing contemporary social inequality seems to be merit.

You can have class in the ghetto and trash in the White House.

The inequality that exists today, … derives less from the unequal availability of opportunity than from the unequal ability to exploit opportunity …

If it is held to be morally wrong and anti-social for one man to possess huge estates, which he may develop or not as he chooses, while hundreds of others nearby are relegated to landlessness, why should one people acquire, by similar accident of birth or achievement, a claim to an inordinate share of the good things of life and a right to exclude from them other less fortunate peoples, white, black, or yellow?

Rugged individualism really means the regimentation of the many for the benefit of the few.

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

It has become impossible to deny or obscure the great chasm . . . between an elite that seizes modernity’s choicest fruits while disdaining older truths and uprooted masses, who, on finding themselves cheated of the same fruits, recoil into cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality.

Although I was born into the America that experiences and believes in opportunity, my trips to Ferguson, Detroit, Atlanta, and Chicago have revealed that there is an undercurrent of unease.