Michael Tubbs Quotes

There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

I think that there always have been and always will be at least two Americas - the poor America, the second America, tends to be in the shadows. Sometimes it's an America of people in a ghetto of color, sometimes it's an economic ghetto, but definitely there is a parallel America which people in the dominant America prefer to ignore if they can.

The second truism that we must understand is that poverty does not create our social problems, our social problems create our poverty.

We love wealth, and we hate poor people. I know people who work in TV news who have actually been told to do stand-ups rather than put interviews with poor people on the air. We physically don't want to look at them.

Poverty is ever an inbred growth

Poor people do not cause poverty. Poverty is thrust upon them.

Everyone's seen poverty - well, most have.

We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of 'choice' and a denial of reality - a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, and a growing machinery of social and civil death.

Poverty is the frontier we have to be able to cross.

Capitalism, racism and inhuman technocracy quietly develop in their own way. The causes of misery are no longer to be found in the inner attitudes of men, but have long been institutionalized.

Detroit is really a model for how wealthier and whiter Americans escape the costs of public goods they'd otherwise share with poorer and darker Americans.

I feel sometimes that there's this sense that people are poor because they want to be, or they're working-class because they want to be or because they don't work hard enough. I feel like there's this demonization of working people in general, but specifically definitely labor union members.

There is a hugely underserved population out there... those who are the least capable of paying pay the highest.

We think of violence as being conflict and fighting and wars and so forth, but the most ongoing horrific measure of violence is in the horrible poverty of the Third World... and the poverty in the United States as well.

Candidates don't want to be associated with poor people, people who have jobs or are ugly; they want to be associated with a certain middle class demographic, so as a result they leave those others out completely.

Obviously, I have certain policy positions that I push and advocate for that would benefit people dealing in a system that breeds inequality and makes life more difficult for people.

If poverty were a man, I would have slain him.

In the West, we've lost our intuitive understanding of how poverty shapes thinking.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

There are two Americas - separate, unequal, and no longer even acknowledging each other except on the barest cultural terms. In the one nation, new millionaires are minted every day. In the other, human beings no longer necessary to our economy, to our society, are being devalued and destroyed.

We know that social exclusion is closely tied to the new economic world order, globalized, with free and open markets, which isn't bringing prosperity or social justice to all.

Poverty is often off the beaten track. It always has been.

Deep persistent poverty is unworthy of our nation’s promise …. All of us are diminished when any are hopeless.

We are at great risk in our democracy for failing to understand the great depths of poverty.

There's no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty.