James Baldwin Quotes

In a world where people are hungry for quick fixes and sound bites, for instant gratification, there's no patience for the long, slow rebuilding process: implementing after-school programs, hiring more community workers to act as mentors, adding more job training programs in marginalized areas.

We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.

You cannot let men live like pigs …. We need not wait for the Millennium to get rid of the slum. We can do it now.

If you empower people in their communities and get them jobs, no one like Dudus Coke can win their hearts and minds and hold them hostage.

If you really believe that you're making a difference and that you can leave a legacy of better schools and jobs and safer streets, why would you not spend the money? The objective is to improve the schools, bring down crime, build affordable housing, clean the streets - not to have a fair fight.

I know we haven't cleaned up all the slums, but I didn't create the slums, did I?

As soon as I got out of law school, I went to inner city Newark, New Jersey, to become a housing rights lawyer, because people fought for my housing rights, I was going to pay it forward by fighting for others.

My take on gentrification and change is it's usually always a better thing, because when you see all these businesses open and flourishing, that means there are more jobs.

I just don't think the moon is going to be an adequate substitute for the fact that we haven't addressed ourselves to clearing up the slums.

We should concentrate our work not only to a separated housing problem but housing involved in our daily work and all the other functions of the city.

We've made tremendous strides and changes in the City of New York since 1994.

I'm probably proudest of being able to lift a lot of us out of the 'hood. That's the biggest thing, that I've been able to employ a lot of people and give them opportunities.

The only way to kill militancy, to reduce it, is to provide opportunities to people who have no opportunities. I've always told my American friends that.

I was a little lacking in vision as mayor - I failed to understand the significance that housing and the revitalization of housing means for a city.

In the housing projects, people talked of ways to reduce crime, relieve overcrowding, and they were good ideas that we plan to study, and possibly implement.

I'm building shopping centers and movie theaters in the inner cities. So that means supplying jobs and letting blacks understand that we have to build our communities back, not looking to anybody else.

I decided to set out to prove that you could make a reasonable living building for the poor using recycled materials and only hiring unskilled labor.

I applaud the growing commitment of Evangelicals to the needs of the poor and oppressed in urban America.

Working on the film really made me confront my opinions about change and gentrification.

After Yale Law School, I was proud to try to live up to my parents' example and began my career working for The Urban Justice Center in the streets of Newark, organizing residents to fight for better housing conditions.

What America is thirsting for now is a battalion of strong, down-to-earth 'doers' - managers, frontline activists, business and social entrepreneurs engaged in tackling America's manifold problems of unemployment, education, and competitive slouch.

I want to fight poverty and ignorance and give opportunity to those people who are locked out.

The best way to end poverty is to simply give people work, which isn't considered 'sexy' among donors who want to fund a preschool or cure a disease.

I do a number of things working on human rights issues, prison recidivism rates, and then I also push and have worked a lot on the social issues of rebuilding the family.

If you live in a ghetto and really want not to just change your life and your family's life but change your ghetto's life, make your ghetto a good neighbourhood, learn science; try to be like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.