Michael Mann Quotes

'Up in the Air' may be a glossy production sprinkled with laughter and sex, but it captures the distinctive topography of our Great Recession as vividly as a far more dour Hollywood product of 70 years ago, 'The Grapes of Wrath,' did the vastly different landscape of the Great Depression.

You could think of extraordinary examples to the contrary: The Grapes of Wrath... and even into the 70s.

During the Great Depression, African Americans were faced with problems that were not unlike those experienced by the most disadvantaged groups in society. The Great Depression had a leveling effect, and all groups really experienced hard times: poor whites, poor blacks.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

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.

I did not throw out my education lightly, but what I was being taught was of no use in explaining what I saw around me. It was the Great Depression.

You can certainly draw a picture of 2016 which makes it look like the 1930s, which, of course, is what everyone is doing.

Every time the media brings up the tea party, it's painted as racist and extremists - but there's never a backlash, no outrage to those comparisons. ... Working-class people are hurting - and it doesn't seem like anybody cares. When both sides are high-fiving it on the ninth hole when everybody else is without a job - it makes a whole lot of us angry. Something has to change. The policies have to change.

I grew up poor, black, and working class.

We know that Brexit would make our poorest communities poorer still. That it would make the powerless even less able to effect change.

Nobody voted to be poorer, and nobody voted leave on the basis that somebody with a gold-plated pension and inherited wealth would take their jobs away from them.

We need to put priority on addressing issues related to people's daily lives and their economic hardships.

In a country like Mexico, you can't forget about poverty - about how half of the population lives in poverty, and how half of that half live in extreme poverty.

Poverty destroys Americans every day by means of confrontations with the law, disease, pollution, violence and despair.

Now, instead of loading up your jalopy and heading for California, you take a second, badly paid job; 'The Grapes of Wrath' has turned into 'Nickel and Dimed.'

Life is tougher for Americans - especially for those who voted by the highest percentages for President Obama's promise of hope and change.

Poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.

I, Daniel Blake' is a powerful and moving film. But it is a political polemic and is particularly unfair on the public sector professionals who work in Job Centre Plus, in my experience they are proactive and helpful. Completely at odds with their portrayal in the film.

Child poverty is more than an abstract problem to me. It's something I know all too much about.

For many food poverty is the product of a toxic combination of low wages, austerity economics, spiralling food prices and lengthy delays to benefit payments, all of which should concern us.

When you go to places like Gary and Detroit, you see the economic problem in this country and who it's really affecting.

Everyone's seen poverty - well, most have.

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.

To suppose such a thing possible as a society, in which men, who are able and willing to work, cannot support their families, and ought, with a great part of the women, to be compelled to lead a life of celibacy, for fear of having children to be starved; to suppose such a thing possible is monstrous.

Poverty ennobles no one; it brutalizes common people and makes them hungry and old.