L. Neil Smith Quotes

One of the most disruptive forces in politics is the feeling that wealth is concentrated in the hands of an alien people.

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

When we are not extracting wealth from nature, we are extracting it from the working and middle classes.

The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.

At the moment we have a ruling class that has one law and the people the other.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

Ageism is as odious as racism and sexism.

I have no doubt but that the misery of the lower classes will be found to abate whenever the Government assumes a freer aspect and the laws favor a subdivision of Property.

During those twelve hour nights we’d chat about the motormen, conductors, guards etc. whose conditions were even worse. They had to work a ‘spread’ of 16 hours each day in order to get 10 hours pay. Negro workers could get jobs only as porters. They were subjected to treatment that makes Little Rock and Birmingham seem liberal and respectable by comparison … I also saw Catholic ticket agents fired by Catholic bosses for going to mass early in the morning while the porter ‘covered’ the booth for half an hour. Protestant bosses fired Protestant workers for similar crimes — going to church. The Jewish workers had no trouble with the subway bosses — Jews were denied employment in the transit lines.

The central issue of our time remains the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

The workingmen have been exploited all the way up and down the line by employers, landlords, everybody.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

Choose equality …. Inequality has the natural and necessary effect … of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

There is an unbroken chain of opposition to the introduction of economic freedom and to the capitalist autonomy of the economic sphere. ...In every case the opposition could only be overcome--peacefully or by force--because of the promise of capitalism to establish equality. ...That this promise was an illusion we all know

It's not class warfare to talk about fairness.

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

That certain groups do much better in America than others—as measured by income, occupational status, test scores and so on – is difficult to talk about.

Since Mill, in 1848, wrote his chapter on the future of the working classes, the question of the distribution of wealth has be-come of still greater importance. We cannot look round on the political phenomena of to-day without seeing that this question is at the root of them. We see the perplexity in which men stand, and the divisions springing up in our great political parties, because of the uncertainty of politicians how to grapple with it.

Negro Merchants would gain control of all the lands in the Colony, leaving nothing for all the laboring poor white Men.

Over 17 years, I took on banks, landlords, real estate firms, local governments, anybody who treated anybody unfairly.

We are saying that when our nation targets law enforcement efforts at someone's appearance or what neighborhood they live in or what job they do, it is not living up to our nation's basic ideals.

As Washington prospers, workers suffer.