Harry Laughlin Quotes

This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.

Underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions.

Poverty is a corrosive brew, capable of eating away at the underpinnings of democratic life itself.

There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

I was discriminated against because I was Jewish, Italian, black and Puerto Rican. But maybe the worst prejudice I experienced was against the poor. I grew up on welfare and often had to move in the middle of the night because we couldn't pay the rent.

Now we just showin' and provin' that there's a ghetto everywhere you go.

Social inequality kills. It unduly deprives individuals and communities experiencing social deprivation of their health, increases their burden of disease and disease, and cuts short their lives.

A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit—in other words social failures—would allow us to solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums…. [Forced sterilization] can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.

We will not settle for a state that will settle for an underclass.

To one American family out of four, the idea of capitalism as a benign system of comfort, dignity, and personal advance is only a myth, or worse, a bitter mockery.

We still have an underclass in this country who are constantly ignored and vilified.

Britain is now living with the consequences of allowing an underclass to take root and fester.

The rich stick together; the poor and the marginalised are thrown together.

A poor man is like a foreigner in his own country.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

There are people in whole parts of our cities who are being totally left behind and disregarded. They are unheard. They are told they are unneeded by this economy. And that extreme poverty breeds conditions for extreme violence.

The poor have to labour in the face of the majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

Poverty is everyone's problem. It cuts across any line you can name: age, race, social, geographic or religious. Whether you are black or white; rich, middle-class or poor, we are ALL touched by poverty.

I gained direct knowledge of the life of the poor in big towns: I have lived the narrowing mechanism of its conditioning and feared it.

The poor are discussed as this homogeneous mash, like porridge. The idea that they might be individuals, and be where they are for very different, diverse reasons, again seems to escape some people.

A shining city is perhaps all the President [Ronald Reagan] sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there's another part to the shining city. In this part of the shining city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, and more people who need help and can't find it.

Hurricane Katrina was a disaster. It exposed the soft underbelly of America when it comes to race and class.

The poor are the Negroes of Europe.

The great mass of the poor in countries are become an hereditary race, and it is next to impossible them to get out of that state of themselves

Class prejudice is applied both the white and black poor, whose demographic traits are converging. But classism combines with latent and historic racism to create a particularly malicious brew. People are now assigned a whole range of supposedly underclass traits based on a single glimpse of skin color.