We used to say poor people had lousy genes. Then we decided that wasn't OK, but we transferred the prejudice to upbringing. We said, 'You were neglected as a child, so you'll never make it.' That's just as pernicious.

PEOPLE are experience rich and theory poor. People who are busy doing things ? as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops ? don't have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them.

I'm a lot more interested in people than I used to be. I used to be most interested in abstract ideas, and people were an afterthought, but that's changed a bit.

Nature's noblemen are everywhere, in town and out of town, gloved and rough-handed, rich and poor. Prejudice against a lord because he is a lord, is losing the chance of finding a good fellow, as much as prejudice against a ploughman because he is a ploughman.

There are a lot of poor areas, a lot of areas where insurance is not common,

We all assume that if you're weak and poor, you're never going to win. In fact, the real world is full of examples where the exact opposite happens, where the weak win and the strong screw up.