Disadvantaged Youth Quotes

The last thing the theatre owners wanted was for people who spent $200 to see 'Les Miserables' to come out again and see the real miserable children of America, right there on the sidewalk.

We don't want a country populated by children feeding themselves from garbage dumps.

I'm enjoying the money, the big house, the cars; what ghetto kid wouldn't?

I come from where Mike Tyson came from. I come from right across the street from Jay-Z. I didn't have a pond in my backyard. I saw violence.

There is a lot of talent in our slums.

Unless we improve our ability to provide a quality education for underprivileged kids, we're not going to really overcome in a massive way our past.

In Chicago, a lot of people don't really got nothing to live for. Everybody can't ball. Everybody can't rap. Nobody is really doing those activities. There's nothing to do but the streets.

I'm from a place where young people traditionally do not have resources.

While campaigning, I got to know many high-school teachers, and let me say that the good ones are the unsung heroes of our society, and the bad ones are the gravediggers.

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

Americans should understand that 50%, or something like, of the kids in inner-city schools, often poor and often minority, don't graduate. And the ones that do don't necessarily have the skills to get a job. That is the biggest disgrace in this country.

I was a prosecutor for 25 years. I saw so many 15, 16, even 20 year-olds who could not read, had little hope that they would ever find work, faced more challenges than opportunities in life, dropped out of school at some point, and turned to crime.

My passion is kids, more than just kids is underprivileged kids and orphans.

Most teachers prefer to teach highly motivated kids who live in safe communities.

All over the world, children facing the challenges of poverty attend schools that aren't designed to meet their extra needs; across country lines, the lives of marginalized kids look far more similar than they do different.

Poor children in Baltimore face even worse odds than low-income kids elsewhere, mostly because they remain in impoverished neighborhoods.

Northern Uganda presents a situation of extraordinary violation of the rights of children.

Coming from the projects, we used to sneak into the United Center, watch some games; they chased us out and everything.

There are 500,000 poor children in this state that did not choose to be poor, and we have to take care of them.

The jails are full of kids from kids' homes. You're 16 years old, and you're out on the street. How you going to fend for yourself at 16 if you've not had an education? You're going to turn to crime.

Tragically, the White House Task Force on Disadvantaged Youth reported that one-quarter of our young people are at serious risk of not achieving productive adulthood.

There are young people all over the country who don’t always have the helping hand, the second chance that I had.

In Cameroon, kids have many problems. They think everything is lost before they are born. It seems like they are not allowed to dream. They are not allowed to be ambitious. They just accept being the victim of their life.

These children are unfortunate rather than criminal. Their delinquency is not the product of nature but rather the cruel circumstances into which they were born.

I think that when we're talking about youth violence, we're talking about kids who don't have opportunities, so they're engaged in a certain degree of lawlessness, because we as a society have failed them.