Sharan Burrow Quotes

Remember, until the 1970s, the spread of democracy has always been accompanied by the decline of inequality. The more democratic our societies have been, the more equal they have been becoming. Now we have the reverse tendency. The spread of democracy now is very much accompanied by the increase in inequality.

It is conflict overall that mires people in poverty. That is the first law of development.

Global warming, the ongoing destruction of the planet, Third World debt, the uselessness of the railways, the takeover by the corporations, the scary George Bush person: all these things are important and should be animating me into outrage. Yet somehow they do not.

People feel like the system is rigged against them, and here is the painful part, they're right. The system is rigged.

The American People got fucked. Then tell 'em the American Family got fucked.

Keeping people on the margins of cultural, social and political life constitutes in many nations one of the most glaring injustices of our time.

The real threat to the democracy is the half a nation in poverty.

The people are getting screwed In this country.

In a state of poverty, illiteracy, people just remain exposed to all kinds of manipulation. That's what we have lived. It's easier to tell a poor person, 'You know what, you are poor, you're hungry because the other one has taken away your rights.'

The cancer that demands our urgent attention is corruption and poverty.

We can't continue to sit on our hands and sit idly by as people are being brutalized, disenfranchised, and left out of the system.

High corruption and the influence of big business and the wealthy elite keeps the poorest Nigerians trapped in poverty and cut off from the benefits of economic growth and basic services. Some people - searching for the means to survive - became vulnerable to groups like Boko Haram.

I think that there always have been and always will be at least two Americas - the poor America, the second America, tends to be in the shadows. Sometimes it's an America of people in a ghetto of color, sometimes it's an economic ghetto, but definitely there is a parallel America which people in the dominant America prefer to ignore if they can.

We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of 'choice' and a denial of reality - a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, and a growing machinery of social and civil death.

Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals.

But after the spirit of conquest had changed the first governments, all the succeeding ones have, in general, proved one continued series of injustice, which has reigned in all countries for almost four thousand years.

Things do go wrong. Not everyone benefits from the capitalist dream.

We continue to blame the poor for their own condition. They are lazy. We do not want to know that the poorest of the poor are toddlers under three years of age.

Large numbers of people are broken from the notion that the system is working for people, that the system is just or humane or peaceful.

Property in man, always morally unjust, has become nationally dangerous.

America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.

A lot of people are deeply dissatisfied by the diminishing control they have over their lives, because of the way our system of government is set up, to cater to the powerful, cater to the wealthy, cater to the corporations, and not to the individual American citizen.

We live in a very dysfunctional society, and this is a very, very dysfunctional Administration.

Poverty and lack of education are ruining our planet.

The young people I teach now know they are being sold down the river before we even start studying the trends and numbers. That's the toughest part of being a high school economics teacher... being a witness when our children realize that the greatest deficit of all is a deficit of leadership.