Mos Def Quotes

If you don't have jobs, it's hard to have other things like health and education.

Every time I have a political rally I meet some people who say, "I need a job."

People would rather live in an area of poverty than in an area where there are no jobs, because if they live in poverty, they have a certain sense of hope they can get out of it. If there are no jobs, there's no hope. And bad things come from that.

American Dream Is Under Assault. People that haven't been able to find a job in months and this growing sense in this country that this is the new normal, well we can't accept that.

There's no dignity, no decency, or health today for men that haven't got a job. All other things depend on work today.

You couldn't beg, borrow, or steal a job in 1931, 1932... it was really tough.

I am almost overwhelmed by applications for employment. What an alms house is this City of Washington!

…it would be much better to enable every man to earn his own living, instead of being driven to the awful necessity of stealing and then dying for it.

Jobless Men Keep Going We Can’t Take Care of Our Own

It was the unemployment that was the hardest to bear. The jobless millions were like an embolism in the nation's vital circulation; and while their indisputable existence argued more forcibly than any text that something was wrong with the system, the economists wrung their hands and racked their brains and called upon the spirit of Adam Smith, but could offer neither diagnosis or remedy.

African-Americans now 45 percent poverty in the inner cities. The education is a disaster. Jobs are essentially nonexistent.

The lack of work destroys people.

Unemployment, with its injustice for the man who seeks and thirsts for employment, who begs for labour and cannot get it, and who is punished for failure he is not responsible for by the starvation of his children--that torture is something that private enterprise ought to remedy for its own sake.

Of all aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment.

As long as many of our people still live in utter poverty, as long as children still live under plastic covers, as long as many of our people are still without jobs, no South African should rest and wallow in the joy of freedom.

It were depression, too. They cut my wages down once at the foundry. They cut my wages down again. Then they cut my wages out, also the job.

I have never forgotten how the deprivation of work erodes human beings, those not working and those related to them. And from that time on, I loathed an economic that could put a huge part of its workforce on the streets with no compunction.

I'm asking for the vote of every single African-American citizen. You're living in poverty. Your schools are no good. You have no jobs.

A body of 500 men chosen at random from amongst the unemployed.

Herman Cain answered the Wall Street protesters, and he had a message for these protesters. He said, 'If you don't have a job, if you're not rich, don't blame Wall Street, don't blame the banks, blame yourself.' And a nation of out of work teabaggers said, 'Yeah! Hey, wait a minute.'

During the Depression years, I began to identify to some extent with the unemployed, the organization for the unemployed at that period.

The saddest object in civilization, and to my mind the greatest confession of its failure, is the man who can work, who wants work, and who is not allowed to work.

I walked the streets of New York for two years begging for a job, and I couldn't get one.

We just kept moving back and forth because my mother never had a job. We kept getting kicked out of every house we were in. I believe six months was the longest we ever lived in a house.