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Disadvantaged Quotes

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“I'd hoped for someone who was remarkably intelligent, but disadvantaged by home circumstance, someone who only needed an hour's extra tuition a week to become some kind of working-class prodigy. I wanted my hour a week to make the difference between a future addicted to heroin and a future studying English at Oxford. That was the sort of kid I wanted, and instead they'd given me someone whose chief interest was in eating fruit. I mean, what did he need to read for? There's an international symbol for the gents' toilets, and he could always get his mother to tell him what was on television.”

“{...], reality is painful, so people invent justifications and use them to supplant measurement of reality. We could use the old cliché of an ostrich hiding its head in the sand, but only if there's a television down there, dramatizing the sadness. It is an inversion of art: instead of singing the beautiful, we find praises for the ugly and disguise it as beauty, because we have lost belief in beauty. As good nihilists, we note that this loss of beauty is vested more in belief than in beauty. We have made beauty contingent upon so many moral justifications that it is socially taboo to note beauty without somehow tying it to the plight of the disadvantaged.”

“to the extent that either sex is disadvantaged, the whole culture is poorer, and the sex that, superficially, inherits the earth, inherits only a very partial legacy. The more whole the culture, the more whole each member, each man, each woman, each child will be.”

“The widespread distribution of private property ownership is the cornerstone of American liberty. Without it neither our free enterprise system nor our republican form of government could long endure.... The next Republican Administration will...not only protect the cherished human right of property ownership, but will also work to help millions of Americans - particularly those from disadvantaged groups - to share in the ownership of the wealth of their nation.”

“Take the life issue. This issue requires a president and an administration leading our nation to understand the importance of life. This whole faith-based initiative really ties into a larger cultural issue that we're working on. It begins to affect the life issue, as well as the human dignity issue, because when you're talking about welcoming people of faith to help people who are disadvantaged and are unable to defend themselves, the logical step is also those babies.”

“Solidarity is learned through 'contact' rather than 'concepts.' Students in the course of their formation, must let the gritty reality of this world into their lives, so they can learn to feel it, think about it critically, respond to its suffering and engage it constructively. They should learn to perceive, think, judge, choose and act for the rights of others, especially the disadvantaged and the oppressed.”

“Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today's disadvantaged to become tomorrow's privileged and, in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a fuller and richer life.”

“Some minds seem almost to create themselves, springing up under every disadvantage and working their solitary but irresistible way through a thousand obstacles.”

“The terms "idiot" and "lunatic" were acceptable diagnostic terms in England up until 1959. "Imbecile" and "feeble-minded person" were, likewise, listed as official categories in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. England has always lagged a bit behind in discarding outdated terms for the disadvantaged. When I was there in 1980, it was still possible to shop for used clothing at the local Spastic Shop. That is, compared to the United States, where it takes, oh, about twenty-five minutes for a diagnostic euphemism to become a conversational faux pas.”

“It's been a struggling school for many, many years, and [that's] not surprising since it's serving some of the most disadvantaged kids in the city. It wasn't the only one by any means, but it was among those. It shows that things like good, steady, stable leadership makes a huge difference; focusing on the culture of the schools as a place where kids feel supported and want to be; supporting the teachers, so they want to stay and work hard.”

“That was a general impression that one got, that she [Eleanor Roosevelt] was always flitting around the country and descending on some place in the Ozarks that she decided was disadvantaged, and announcing that something had to be done. And she had a very active social conscience, which I think in general is to her credit, although it tended, as many people thought, to just be overdone to the point where it gave rise to this crack that she regarded the whole world as one vast slum project”

“Affirmative action ignores our society's real minorities - members of the disadvantaged classes, no matter what their race. We have this ludicrous bureaucratic sense that certain racial groups, regardless of class, are minorities. So what happens is those "minorities" at the very top of the ladder get chosen for everything.”

“We don't have the right to tell less fortunate disadvantaged people that they can't come to the USA and get what we have. You see, that's all predicated on the fact that what we have is simply luck and it isn't fair that the rest of the world doesn't have it. The rest of the world could have it. Human civilization has been around however many number of years you want to add up.”

“I often think people on opposite sides of the political spectrum may have similar values around care, around thriving or around independence, or around helping the disadvantaged, but they have different ideologies, different ideas and philosophies about how to go about that. It's important that we start to see each others humanness, while at the same time not losing sight of those differences, views and speeches and actions that do cause harm, that we're clearly taking a stand against.”

“The British inclined more towards the feudal mentality, the feudal structures rather than the more radical progressive elements who would re-shape society and institute pretty egalitarian systems of governance with opportunity for even disadvantaged people and so I found that decolonisation was not just the end of political struggle in Nigeria.”

“As a former high school teacher and a student in a class of 60 urchins at St. Brigid's grammar school, I know that education is all about discipline and motivation. Disadvantaged students need extra attention, a stable school environment, and enough teacher creativity to stimulate their imaginations. Those things are not expensive.”

“I had no need to apologize that the look-wider, search-more affirmative action that Princeton and Yale practiced had opened doors for me. That was its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run.”