Matthew Desmond Quotes

l had a job, and if you had a job in the depression you were rich.

I know people who have been without a home for ages, and lots of my friends are sofa surfing because they are in between jobs or saving for degrees and other studies - paying £500 rent every month is just not feasible for them.

Poverty doesn't imply necessarily violence.

Somebody has been cashing checks, and they've been bouncing back on us. And these people, the poor class of Negroes and the poor class of white people, they're getting tired of it.

When I was a deacon, the ominous signs of the Great Depression began to appear. Tens of thousands lost their jobs. Money was scarce. Families had to do without. Some young people did not ask their mothers, 'What's for dinner?' because they knew all too well that their cupboards held very little.

I rescue families who are losing their homes because they have no jobs and they can't pay the mortgage and the banks are foreclosing on their homes.

It's heartbreaking to see so many people trapped in a web of enforced idleness, deep debt, and gnawing self-doubt.

People who didn't know the depression just don't know what being poor means.

Poverty causes crime.

The high cost of housing is crushing poor families and sending them to a state of desperation.

When I was growing up, I heard horror stories about producers losing their houses overnight. No matter who the family is, hearing of them getting evicted is very sad.

In 2010 there were a lot of folks who were still out of work. There were a lot of folks who had lost their homes or saw their home values plummet, their 401k's plummet.

Poverty became something one could see and experience firsthand, no matter where one was on the economic ladder; it became something you could viscerally experience through the lives of friends, family, neighbors, colleagues. I'd venture to say it's a rare person in 2013 America who knows nobody who lost a job in the recession, or knows nobody whose home went underwater or who went into foreclosure.

Tonight, more Americans are out of work and more are working harder for less. More of you have lost your homes and even more are watching your home values plummet. More of you have cars you can't afford to drive, credit card bills you can't afford to pay, and tuition that's beyond your reach.

I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty - they are not out on the street; they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata.

Poverty of course is no disgrace, but it is damned annoying.

Footage of people camped out at Best Buy or elsewhere is not remotely a celebration. Rather, it's a reminder of just how economically distressed a large percentage of our populace is.

You and I can be busy, and we take a vacation from work. You can't take a break from being poor. You can't say, 'Hey I've had enough of worrying about money, I'm just going to be rich for a couple of weeks until I've recovered.'

I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people.

There is nothing worse than being ashamed of parsimony or poverty.

The time after college and before music was really rough. I couldn't afford food. I was eating bread and butter for five months. Living in New Orleans, I couldn't afford to take care of myself. I had no health insurance.

While some people are certainly seeing economic benefits, many others are unemployed, underemployed, without health insurance and struggling to make ends meet.

Every day I've got to hear about unemployment and people starving.

When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.

Every day, families in the United States face the stark choice between a roof over their heads and food on the table. Buying health insurance, owning a home, and saving up for college are just too far out of their reach.