Andrew Neil Quotes

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

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

There are two Americas - separate, unequal, and no longer even acknowledging each other except on the barest cultural terms. In the one nation, new millionaires are minted every day. In the other, human beings no longer necessary to our economy, to our society, are being devalued and destroyed.

It's not an underclass anymore; it's an outer class.

… the submerged tenth

Poor men's words have little weight.

Poverty causes crime.

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

The endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society.

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

If you have extremes of haves and have-nots where the gap keeps growing, the have-nots group together and create social disorder, as they can't see a way out of their situation.

When your work is nonfiction about low-income communities, pretty much anything that's not nonfiction about low-income communities feels like a guilty pleasure.

When people lack jobs, opportunity, and ownership of property they have little or no stake in their communities.

Inequality causes problems by creating fissures in societies, leaving those at the bottom feeling marginalized or disenfranchised.

The poor are the Negroes of Europe.

The association of poverty with progress is the enigma of our times.

It has been the purpose of the ruling class, apparently, to build new barriers between themselves and the common people, rather than tear away any of those already existing. I think no one can understand the actual condition of the mass of whites in Georgia and the Carolinas, except by some daily contact with them. The injustice done to three fourths of them was hardly less than that done to all the blacks.... Nine of every ten white men in South Carolina had almost as little to do with even State affairs as the negroes had.

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

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.

Poverty is sexist.

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 has become so prevalent in the U.S. that examples of its negative impact on the middle class are as common as Kanye West saying something cringeworthy in the media.

I think, for me, the biggest issue is poverty in general, poverty in this time of plenty. It's reflected in homelessness. It's reflected in educational gaps. It's reflected in racial disparities.

I fall into the camp that income inequality is the biggest problem we face.

Take a walk around many of our cities and you will find areas of deprivation, high worklessness and educational failure only yards from areas of prosperity and employment.