Arthur Ashe Quotes

They [poor youth] don't have any respect for the property of others because they don't have any property.

A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

Nobody talks about the poor. Everybody talks about the middle class and just kinda want to ignore that the poor exist. And you cannot ignore that they exist if you want to help them.

Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.

We cannot afford to leave the poor behind.

I don't mind the rich getting richer, but the poor shouldn't be getting poorer, and there should be more people moving into the middle class.

Those born into poverty or on the margins of society require our extra support to realize their dreams.

What began as a political protest turned into a class war and a racial pogrom.

A New Dealer regrets poverty and deplores the fact that it is necessary for society to slough off its misfits as an individual sheds his impurities and his diseases. But New Dealers believe that human want and human distress should be prevented or at least ameliorated.

If you are poor today, you will always be poor. Only the rich now acquire riches.

The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, no worse, for a people than another.

For the past five years we’ve been deluged by programs for the unemployed, programs for the cities, programs for the poor. And we have reaped from these programs an ugly harvest of frustration, violence and failure across the land

There never can be equality of rewards or possessions so long as the human plan contains varied talents and differing degrees of industry and thrift, but ours ought to be a country free from the great blotches of distressed poverty.

Income inequality is the central problem all the way across the world.

Where and when have riots and anarchy been provoked by wise measures? If the government had acted wisely, and if their measures had met the needs of the poor peasants, would there have been unrest among the peasant masses?

… white racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture (of private discrimination and segregation) that has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.

Worrying about the poor is one thing. To contend that equality is necessary for growth is an altogether different and more radical idea.

The poor don't want some small life. They don't want to game the system. They want to contribute, and they want to thrive. But poverty reduces people born for better things.

I am a coolie and the son of a coolie. I was born with the poor, and I am still poor. My sympathies have always been with the struggling mass.

If I could help every ghetto, I would.

We forgot that Martin Luther King, Jr. changed his discourse toward the end of his life because he understood that the real fundamental problem of this country was not just race, it was class. It was the economical situation of not only poor blacks but also the poor white part of the population and everything in between.

I came from the most humble side of society, and I know what it's like to be poor, really poor, and I was brought up in the '60s and '70s very poor, and I'm very happy flying the flag for the working man.

To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.

Income inequity has to be addressed.

The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.