William Berkeley Quotes

Poverty is the parent of revolution.

Revolutions break out when opposite parties, the rich and the poor, are equally balanced, and there is little or nothing between them.

Communism is a hateful thing and a menace to peace and organized government; but the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of over weening cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil, which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wild disorder the citadel of rule.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

It is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.

People without jobs cannot be expected to behave in a lawful, measured way.

There is a rich and haughty King who is blessed with such neighbours as are not likely to disturb him and has nothing to fear from his miserable subjects; but the whole body of that state is full of boils and wounds and putrid sores. There is no real strength in it. The people are so unwilling to serve him that he is said to have put to death above fourscore thousand of his own soldiers within the space of fifteen years for flying from their colours, and if he were vigorously attacked, little help could be expected from a discontented nobility or a starving and despairing people.

You can see what happens when people don't feel they have a chance. You can see the ramifications of that.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless.

Poor men's reasons are not heard.

Peace to the shacks! War on the palaces!

Poverty does not make people terrorists, but terrorists can exploit the frustration it creates and use it as a breeding-ground for violent ideas.

The tensions between authority and the people need to be heard, especially when they are suffering and they can't eat.

Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.

I came to the cities in a time of disorder When hunger ruled. I came among men in a time of uprising And I revolted with them.

The most dreaded of all wars, the war of the poor against the rich … will come and come with all its horrors.

Most of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and have nots.

Disenfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white.

What our country really is, the home of oppression and injustice, a nightmare of misery, an inferno of suffering and human hell, a jungle of wild beasts.

A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

When the economy prospers, but ordinary people do not, it is only a matter of time before there is a social explosion.

In the beginning, all men were alike and they lived in peace and they shared among them what they had. But now there are two kinds of men, the master and the slave. But there are more of us than there are of you, many more. And we are stronger than you, better than you. All that is good in mankind belongs to us.

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it. So long as they tramp the streets, whose stones they lay, whose filth they clean, whose sewers they dig, yet upon which they must not stand too long lest the policeman bid them "move on"; as long as they go from factory to factory, begging for the opportunity to be a slave, receiving the insults of bosses and foremen, getting the old "no," the old shake of the head, in these factories they built, whose machines they wrought; so long as they consent to herd like cattle, in the cities, driven year after year, more and more, off the mortgaged land, the land they cleared, fertilized, cultivated, rendered of value; so long as they stand shivering, gazing thro' plate glass windows at overcoats, which they made, but cannot buy, starving in the midst of food they produced but cannot have; so long as they continue to do these things vaguely relying upon some power outside themselves, be it god, or priest, or politician, or employer, or charitable society, to remedy matters, so long deliverance will be delayed.

Poverty is a corrosive brew, capable of eating away at the underpinnings of democratic life itself.