Opportunity Gap Quotes

Some people can work their butts off and never get what they're aiming for while others can get it without any effort at all.

America is a young country, with small inequalities of property, and without manufactures. Few people are here dependent on the rich, for every man has an opportunity of becoming rich himself…the people of New England enjoy an equality of condition unknown in any other part of the world.

Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available.

In Congress, I will fight for an education system that bridges the opportunity gap in order to help close the achievement gap, and prioritize models that sustain and enrich whole people and communities.

The American dream itself is declining.

In the industry, artists of of color struggle the most. Caucasian artists have really solidified themselves in the industry, and with African Americans now we see directors and producers who vow to only produce work that shines a light on African American artists. But everybody in the middle gets lost.

We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.

The problem is not just affirmative action, though. The problem is poor people, working people and their children, and affirmative action for the most part doesn't even apply to them.

There has been a terrible hemorrhage of educated women to the West where they can flourish. I understand, but it is terrible. We must stay home.

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?

If we don't empower families to be able to have a quality education, then their children - for the first time in American history, truly the first time - will not have the same economic opportunities.

We remain a country where a young person's chance of fulfilling their potential rests on the vagaries of where they were born and what their parents do, rather than their innate talent and ambition.

A lot of the time, you see all this ambition from these black actors, and it's just pouring off the screen. Because they don't often get a chance to work, and when they do, they don't usually get a chance to work with other black people.

The erosion of equal opportunity is among the greatest threats to our exceptionalism as a nation. But it also provides us with an exciting and historic opportunity: to help more people than ever achieve the American Dream.

The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others”, and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through the those gates.

As an actor, I have casting issues. I'm a minority. I don't have trouble making a living, but as far as being on the food chain of the pecking order of actors, I'm not at the top of it. With the jobs that I do, there are always control issues with directors and producers.

I'm not supposed to be here. A lot of people from where I'm from don't make it.

The rich don't exploit the poor. They just out-compete them.

If my future were determined just by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn't be here. I guarantee you that.

During all the years I entertained at the Baby Grand night club in Harlem, 90 percent of the audience was white. But when I tried to break Into television, I was told that white folks wouldn't understand what I was talking about.

I wasn't raised to make history. In high school and family, no one around me was politically involved, and few of my friends planned to attend college or even thought about it.

Like so many first generation children of Indian immigrants, I learned to believe in a dream that is as much American as it is universal: a dream of equal opportunity for all based on merit, of power concentrated not in the hands of a few at the top, but fanning across a large, educated, and civically engaged middle class.

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.

Black folks don't have a chance, so they are in the hood, dealing drugs, in a shoot-out. They do it again and one more time they are out.