Spiro Agnew Quotes

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

No matter where you from, there's ghettos all over the place.

I've been in many of them and to some extent I would have to say this; if you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

You see, I was born in the slums, that was before the ghetto. The ghetto was kind of refined; the slums was right there on the ground.

The New Orleans I knew ain't no more.

I was brought up in this part of Detroit that they used to call the ghetto.

I have lived in Chicago all my life and I still say we have no ghettos in Chicago.

A lot of the stories about urban America tend to be written on the margins. We focus a lot on these big global cities - New York, San Francisco - or we focus on cities that are having the toughest time - Detroit, Newark, Camden.

Some white Milwakeeans still referred to the North side as 'the cire', as they did in the 1960s, and if they ventured into it, they saw street after street of sagging duplexes, fading murals, twenty-four hour daycares, and corner stores with 'WIC Accepted Here' signs.

There's not a lot of hope coming from the inner city.

I just thought everybody lived around abandoned buildings and crack-heads, ... I lived in the ghetto until I was like 19. I came to Los Angeles, stayed at hotels and stuff. When I got back and I saw what my neighborhood looked like, I started getting scared.

If those communities are left to decay, this city will decay.

I can't be calm when I drive through sections of Atlanta that look more like Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, than America.

The slum is the measure of civilization.

I'm a good little middle-class boy. I live in Gloucestershire or Kensington. I don't exist in the war zone, but it's certainly not far away. I grew up in an area where it is a war zone - south London.

In Paris, where I live, the inner neighborhoods are only available to the white elite. The poor and dispossessed are shuffled out to suburbs and never seen.

Some people see Baltimore as a hopeless place. Some have even made a lot of money on it.

My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.

If you look at the data, the inner city that was the riot zone lost 55,000 jobs in the ten years from 1992 to 2002, instead of gaining a surplus of 50,000.

I grew up on 135th Street. I grew up on the poor side of New York. I grew up in Harlem.

More than a billion people in the world live in slums today, roughly one out of every three inhabitants of cities.

Employers would rather not hire a lot of workers from the inner city. They feel people from the inner city are not job-ready, that the kids have been poorly educated, that they can't read, they can't write, they can't speak.

Hurricane Katrina was a disaster. It exposed the soft underbelly of America when it comes to race and class.

I know we haven't cleaned up all the slums, but I didn't create the slums, did I?

Look what we have built ... low-income projects that became worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.