Billy Bragg Quotes

I got into the race because I'm concerned for my children, and for the opportunities they don't have. Really, it's for the same concerns that the people of the 16th district have. They're concerned about jobs.

The ultimate test of the value of a political system is whether it helps that society to establish conditions which improve the standard of living for the majority of its people.

The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.

...in the midst of migrants in search of a better life there are people in need of protection: refugees and asylum-seekers, women and children victims of trafficking...Many move simply to avoid dying of hunger. When leaving is not an option but a necessity, this is more than poverty.

When people consume, they want more. Then they choose the best, and you suddenly get innovation coming in. Now combine that with desperation and people wanting to get a better life: you have a potent combination for innovation.

To my mind, when the Partition happened, the generation of my parents worked to ensure livelihood and better life for their children.

All that young people are promised today are the rewards of a shallow materialism and a degree that is defined primarily as a job credential, one that ironically does not even live up to its own claims of guaranteeing either decent employment or a better way of life.

Where America has got to move is not growth for the sake of growth, but it's got to move to a society that provides a high quality of life for all of our people. In other words, if people have health care as a right, as do the people of every other major country, then there's less worry about growth. If people have educational opportunity and their kids can go to college and they have child care, then there's less worry about growth for the sake of growth.

Sometimes it looks as if, the better off they [nations] become, the bigger do they conceive the gap between what is actually their lot and what would be desirable, while in the poor countries large masses of people seem to be satisfied by merely surviving.

I had a cup of tea with Michael Howard after my appointment shortly after I became Home Secretary, and without telling tales out of school, shortly after I became Home Secretary, and he said that when people used to ask him whether he enjoyed it he'd reply that "enjoy" wasn't quite the right description.

The mass of the American people are most emphatically not in the deplorable condition of which you speak.

Living in a place like Pakistan, very often you meet people who are migrating abroad. And sometimes you'll ask their parents, you know - you didn't try to stop them? Like, why didn't you say, don't go - I'll miss you? Stay with me. And, you know, people say, well, it's best for them. They have to go. And parents, you know, take on that sadness because they know it's better for their children if they leave.

You had a flood of immigrants, millions of them, coming to this country. What brought them here? It was the hope for a better life for them and their children. And, in the main, they succeeded. It is hard to find any century in history, in which so large a number of people experience so great an improvement in the conditions of their life, in the opportunities open to them, as in the period of the 19th and early 20th century.

What is worrisome about that is the U.S. standard of living. I think it is very difficult to envision our standard of living being preserved if we are in an economy where all people do is flip hamburgers, wait on people in stores, and sue each other. It’s not much of a basis for an economy.

I've learned that terror doesn't happen because some group of people somewhere like Pakistan or Afghanistan simply decide to hate us. It happens because children aren't being offered a bright enough future that they have a reason to choose life over death.

Across the world, in Africa, Asia, Latin America, everywhere, there is a widespread recognition on the part of the parents, too, that the children's life will go much better by being educated. And that applies to girls as well as boys.

The standard of living has risen along with the size of the world's population since the beginning of recorded time. There is no convincing economic reason why these trends toward a better life should not continue indefinitely.

As the twentieth century draws to a close it has become obvious that material yardsticks alone cannot serve as an adequate measure of human well-being. Even as basic an issue as poverty has to be re-examined to take into account the psychological sense of deprivation that makes people feel poor.

Under capitalism the common man enjoys amenities which in ages gone by were unknown and therefore inaccessible even to the richest people. But, of course, these motorcars, television sets and refrigerators do not make a man happy. In the instant in which he acquires them, he may feel happier than he did before. But as soon as some of his wishes are satisfied, new wishes spring up. Such is human nature.

In the developed world, technological progress means that you can have a situation where there's growth, where there's a way in which everybody can be better off over time.

Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

If Ivanka Trump called, I think good people need to serve.

Take the so-called standard of living. What do most people mean by "living"? They don’t mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science, in its finite but unbounded wisdom, has succeeded in selling their wives.

You can't criticize people for wanting to have a decent life or wanting to live decently.

We had to build a city not for businesses or automobiles, but for children and thus for people. Instead of building highways, we restricted car use. We invested in high-quality sidewalks, pedestrian streets, parks, bicycle paths, libraries; we got rid of thousands of cluttering commercial signs and planted trees. All our everyday efforts have one objective: Happiness.