Edmund Ruffin Quotes

Most women are one man away from welfare.

Poverty breeds a lack of self reliance.

Most poor people earn more than minimum wage when they are working; their problem is not low wages. The problem comes when they are not working.

Bankruptcy exposes the economic vulnerability and insecurity of middle class women.

To be poor and independent is very nearly an impossibility.

Every citizen willing to work and capable of working shall receive a just and living annual wage which will enable him to maintain and educate his family according to the standards of American decency

Most women are only a husband away from welfare.

For in all the world there are no people so piteous and forlorn as those who are forced to eat the bitter bread of dependency in their old age.

The war on poverty is not a struggle simply to support people, to make them dependent on the generosity of others. It is a struggle to give people a chance.

What is the alternative to Social Security for those at the lower end of the income distribution whose personal savings by definition are not going to be that high? There really isn’t any.

The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people, and not too much employment either. Yours are hired by the day, not care for, and scantily compensated, which may be proved in the most painful manner, at any hour in any street of your large towns

It is unjust to let any starve, when we think it just to limit the wages of the poor, so as they can lay up nothing against the time of their impotency and want of work.

General well-being is incompatible with lowness of wages.

My sister women, those struggling with social problems, and those who slave all their lives long for a community – shop, factory and domestic slaves, earning barely a subsistence, and thrown aside to death or the parish when they are no longer profitable – mothers, bearing and rearing children, seeing them go forth… and spending their own last years, lonely and unconsidered in the cheerless wards of the workhouse.

A broke nation is a weak nation.

Unemployed people are spoiled

The working classes may be injuriously degraded and oppressed in three ways: 1st — When they are neglected in infancy. 2nd — When they are overworked by their employer, and are thus rendered incompetent from ignorance to make a good use of high wages when they can procure them. 3rd — When they are paid low wages for their labor

We must preserve not only the bodies of the unemployed from destitution but also their self-respect, their self-reliance, and courage and determination.

There is no use in repeating that threadbare capitalist boast that we have more things than ever before and that workers are better off than were ancient kings. The point is that no age has ever so tragically failed to use the machinery it had for ease and security of living. Things may have increased but so has insecurity. The peasant and artisan of old was assured work and an honorable place in his family and community while he lived. He knew nothing of the dead line at forty or forty-five which gives new terror to old age. He knew almost nothing of unemployment as a social disease which in so-called normal times affects some ten per cent of the workers and is today the lot of twenty-five to thirty-three per cent of them.

The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job. They could only hire people who were ready to work for the wages offered to them. Low as these wage rates were, they were nonetheless much more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them. It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchens and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation.

The extreme profligacy, improvidence, and misery which are so prevalent among the laboring classes in many countries are chiefly to be ascribed to the want of education.

There are people with no high school education who are poor. but there are also university graduates on food bank lines. There are people who are poor because they have made bad choices, gotten addicted to drugs, burned bridges with friends and family — and then there are people who have never taken a drug in their lives, who have huge social networks, and who still can’t make ends meet.

The institution of such supervisatory control and surveillance over the now low orders of society as shall compel them to industry, and provide for the helpless, and thus banish those institutions of pauperism and beggary which are fastening upon the vitals of society, and are so prolific of crime and suffering in certain communities.

One of our most unfortunate believes is that a person who lives on welfare is not only unfortunate, but somehow defective.

The laboring poor, to use a vulgar expression, seem always to live from hand to mouth. Their present wants employ their whole attention, and they seldom think of the future. Even when they have an opportunity of saving they seldom exercise it, but all that is beyond their present necessities goes, generally speaking, to the ale house.