Chris Rock Quotes

The migration of the black middle class out of the cities in the wake of the civil rights movement and the deindustrialization of urban economies has left a corroded core, cut off from the social; mainstream and reliant on inadequate federal support.

Around 1969, my family had just bought a house in a lower-middle-class white neighborhood two blocks away from school. Then, all of a sudden, all the white people left the neighborhood and the school.

I grew up in an area that was the typical city that was a racially divided and economically segregated place. And it had a big influence on me.

When I first arrived in Los Angeles from New York in 2004 to try to break into television, I couldn't believe how segregated it was - how many neighborhoods were nearly all-white or all-black or -Asian or -Latino.

Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.

The world is richer than ever, and the gaps between rich and poor are wider.

We don't have a full black community in Boston. Our people are scattered. There's a middle class where I live in Highland Park but it's not like a piece of Washington or Chicago.

I find the aristocratic parts of London so unattractive and angular; the architecture is so white and gated. But in New York, it's different - even uptown it's really grand, and there's no real segregation there. It's all mixed up.

I was the child at school in second-hand or handmade clothes and, as I grew older, I craved material wealth, a big house and designer clothes.

It turns out that globalisation, while promising sameness through brand-name consumption, was fostering, through uneven economic growth, an intense feeling of difference.

If everybody lives in the same way, there's something almost narcotizing about it, but the true misery of economic class difference is knowing that you can't have what somebody else does.

In middle-income countries, inequality becomes a problem because you can see there is a layer of people who are doing well, while the poor are still stuck there.

New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.

There are huge divorces and divides and chasms in black America between the have-gots and the have-nots, between the monied and the poor, between the educated and the non-educated. And there are huge and growing chasms daily. And I want to say that it's not simply about generation. It's about genre.

New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed... a race for rent.

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

Poverty divide not only nations but societies within nations.

The rich will buy up whole townships at a time and bring us into lordships

Staggering poverty and crippling inequality at hole do not necessarily prevent countries from trying to project their power abroad.

I do think that there is both a very powerful sense of entitlement and a kind of bubble of wealth which makes it hard for the people at the very top to understand the travails of the middle class.

Some white Milwakeeans still referred to the North side as 'the cire', as they did in the 1960s, and if they ventured into it, they saw street after street of sagging duplexes, fading murals, twenty-four hour daycares, and corner stores with 'WIC Accepted Here' signs.

The United States is the richest and also the most unequal country in the world.

Economic inequality is a corrosive force that undermines economic growth, puts a brake on the fight against poverty, and sparks social unrest.

In Los Angeles, wealth and poverty are separated by the freeways. In New York, they're next to each other.

The social scene in Daytona Beach was simple. The white cats surf, and the blacks play music.