George Saunders Quotes

… the struggling masses

Do you hate poor people or do you just hate poor people with jobs?

The central issue of our time remains the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer.

The working poor is a growing population in this country.

The poor will never cease out of the land.

All the poor white people, all the poor black people, all the Hispanics, they're in the same boat. They've got no economic opportunities.

Nobody talks about the poor. Everybody talks about the middle class and just kinda want to ignore that the poor exist. And you cannot ignore that they exist if you want to help them.

India happens to be a rich country inhabited by very poor people.

One of the strangest things about life is that the poor, who need the money the most, are the ones that never have it.

We cannot afford to leave the poor behind.

The economy is not governed with the bottom half in mind.

Few, save the poor, feel for the poor.

It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.

The minimum wage is the black teenage unemployment act. It is the guaranteed way of holding the poor, the minorities and the disenfranchised out of the mainstream is if you price their original services too high.

The poor are discussed as this homogeneous mash, like porridge. The idea that they might be individuals, and be where they are for very different, diverse reasons, again seems to escape some people.

The poor pay more, and that's one of the reasons people get trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder.

A shining city is perhaps all the President [Ronald Reagan] sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there's another part to the shining city. In this part of the shining city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, and more people who need help and can't find it.

Leaders of the business community ... have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in this country - a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old. .

The biggest problem is that the rich people paying the bills do not share the same goals as the poor people they are trying to help. The wealthy have weak incentives to get the right amount of the right thing to those who need it; the poor are in no position to complain if they don’t.

I don't think they [Congress] ought to balance their budget on the backs of the poor.

A poor man is a man who has not got much money. This may seem a simple and unnecessary description, but in the face of a great mass of modern fact and fiction, it seems very necessary indeed; most of our realists and sociologists talk about a poor man as if he were an octopus or an alligator.

‘The laboring poor’ is a detestable, canting phrase.

It is unjust to let any starve, when we think it just to limit the wages of the poor, so as they can lay up nothing against the time of their impotency and want of work.

Most poor people earn more than minimum wage when they are working; their problem is not low wages. The problem comes when they are not working.

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