Grant Shapps Quotes

The economic and social problems would tend to become, like the military situation, more and more difficult as time went on and we became more and more isolated.

Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.

The political system is broken, the economy is broken and so is society. That is why people are so depressed about the state of our country.

Crime, family dissolution, welfare, and low levels of social organization are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work.

We are in a bad way. That herd of wild asses' colts [see Job 11:12], braying and kicking up their heels, is an unsatisfactory result of a hundred years of Democracy.

So, Israel, for all its glory, has failed as a social country because it has not built a strong society, but a very weak one. We succeeded militarily and financially, and we are the 'Start-Up Nation' - but when it comes to social issues, Israel has failed. It is very sad.

The causes of crime are very complicated. But there is a very big literature, as you know, about single parenthood in crime, about race in crime, and about poverty in crime.

Knife crime and gun crime is poverty-driven, and poverty leads to insecurity.

Though there might not be any easy answers to the problem of poverty, its most compelling scribes do not resign themselves to representation solely for the sake of those age-old verities of truth and beauty.

Russia is in the advanced stages of poverty.

Poverty causes crime.

It has become impossible to deny or obscure the great chasm . . . between an elite that seizes modernity’s choicest fruits while disdaining older truths and uprooted masses, who, on finding themselves cheated of the same fruits, recoil into cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality.

It's always been a subtext of our secular optimism that you solve the economic problem, and all other things sort of take care of themselves. Well, we seem to be doing well on the economic side - we are doing very well - and the other things are not solving - they're compounding.

From a planning perspective, economic degradation begets environmental degradation, which begets social degradation.

When you look at where the real problems are among minorities in our society, particularly blacks, it's at the bottom. It's the people who are in school systems that don't educate, neighborhoods where there is a lot of crime, drugs, the whole bit.

The mess in the world is a strong driver because, at the end of the day, it's the increasing unacceptability of the divergences and rifts in the world economically, socially, politically, and culturally which lead everybody to say, 'We have to do something.'

Donald Trump got elected because, in his twisted way, he pointed out the huge troubles in our economy and our democracy.

During the Blair-Brown decade social concerns - what kind of society we have become - have gradually replaced economic worries. People fear that we have become an increasingly fragmented, boorish, more violent society.

I did not have a car in high school and neither did Angelina. Try to imagine. You go to Beverly Hills High, one of the wealthiest high schools in the nation. Even the cheapest car that anyone has is brand new. All my friends are well off. I have a movie-star father and no car. It was debilitating.

In the decades since my youth, I've witnessed the explosion of fatherless families and an exponential increase in illiteracy and crime.

Every person in this country is suffering because of bad governance.

I think there are really serious problems in this country and I think politics in a lot of ways is failing the country.

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.

Social immobility is driven by family background, instability in childhood and often by parents who don't know how to give children the right start in life.

If the impoverishment and community fragmentation continue, it is not a stretch to predict urban wars sparked by inequality, unemployment, and the breakdown of dialogue between leaders and citizens.