Maxine Waters Quotes

Watch the walls come down, whether it's in the South or on Wall Street. When the walls come down, what do we find? More markets, more talent, more capital and growth. Which means that the race and sex discrimination stunt economic growth. It's not good for capitalism. It's not good for America's growth. And it's not morally right.

Poverty and the rule of race that is called apartheid drive the Transkeian migrant from security on the land to work in the cities, and then back again.

Slavery didn't break up the black families as much as liberal welfare rules.

After years of piecemeal reform the current welfare system is complex and unfair.

Inequality is on the rise.

The biggest problem is that the rich people paying the bills do not share the same goals as the poor people they are trying to help. The wealthy have weak incentives to get the right amount of the right thing to those who need it; the poor are in no position to complain if they don’t.

What's going to be a hundred years from now ain't much account to us.... The whites has the lands and the sense, an' the blacks has nothin' but their freedom, an' it's jest like a dream to them.

White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White society created it; white institutions maintain it; and white society condones it.

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.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

We need to have a discussion on race, but we also need to have a discussion on how we are treating poor and minority people in this country.

History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of narrowed our choices.

Since 1980, Republican shredding of the social safety net has disproportionately hit women, particularly women of colour.

Our communities are reeling from poverty, from unemployment, from discrimination of all sorts and different interactions that they're having with the law enforcement, and education system, and so on.

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

Working at the Food Bank with my kids is an eye-opener. The face of hunger isn't the bum on the street drinking Sterno; it's the working poor. They don't look any different, they don't behave any differently, they're not really any less educated. They are incredibly less privileged, and that's it.

Republicans have been accused of abandoning the poor. It's the other way around. They never vote for us.

I think the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. I don't think the black people are going to rise at all; I think most of them are going to die.

Nobody is poor unless he stand in need of justice.

It is bad enough to be white and poor; it is worse still to be black, or brown, and female, and young, and poor. Simply said, race makes class hurt more.

You grow up in America and you're told from day one, 'This is the land of opportunity.' That everybody has an equal chance to make it in this country. And then you look at places like Harlem, and you say, 'That is absolutely a lie.'

Speaking as a black person, welfare is the worst thing that's ever happened to us.

Do you hate poor people or do you just hate poor people with jobs?

Understandably, no peace can sustained when people continue to suffer from hunger, lack of jobs, lack of basic public services - and most of all - lack of opportunity or hope.

Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female.