Langston Hughes Quotes

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.

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

White Man’s Road Thru Black Man’s Home!

With what moral authority can they [the U. S.] speak of human rights — the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated?

The poor man looks upon the law as an enemy, not as a friend. For him, the law is always taking something away.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

Poor men's reasons are not heard.

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

Poor whites have been pitted against poor blacks to assuage the conscience of the affluent.

Woe to them, that take away the right of the poor.

We Blacks have a long history of serving as cannon fodder for interests that are not our own.

Brother! We have, as your friends, fought by your side, and have poured out our blood in your defense, but our arms are now broken. You have grown large. My people have become small, and there are none who take pity on them.

I am afraid the poor Indian will never stand a chance against the English in their land controversies because they are very poor, they have no money. Money is almighty nowadays and the Indians have no learning, no wit, no cunning, the English have it all.

It has been the purpose of the ruling class, apparently, to build new barriers between themselves and the common people, rather than tear away any of those already existing. I think no one can understand the actual condition of the mass of whites in Georgia and the Carolinas, except by some daily contact with them. The injustice done to three fourths of them was hardly less than that done to all the blacks.... Nine of every ten white men in South Carolina had almost as little to do with even State affairs as the negroes had.

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.

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

We can't continue to sit on our hands and sit idly by as people are being brutalized, disenfranchised, and left out of the system.

Face it, the system is rigged, and it's rigged against us.

I'd become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what color they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake.

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

Large numbers of people are broken from the notion that the system is working for people, that the system is just or humane or peaceful.

In the north we could not hope to keep the worst and poorest servant for a single day in the wretched discomfort in which our negro servants are forced habitually to live.

I'm concerned about - the oppression of the poor.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.