Ruby Dee Quotes

Growing up in inner-city Glasgow, it sometimes seemed to me money hadn't been invented.

When ghetto living seems normal, you have no shame, no privacy.

We need to tell the American public the truth. We need to let them know they're not the only ones struggling.

Families in Logan, West Virginia, were going through the same struggles as families in the Bronx, San Francisco, and Houston. This was not a West Virginia problem. This is an American problem, and it has to change.

In financial affairs and dealings with the state, those in the precariat are disadvantaged since they are usually less well-informed and have to do much more to satisfy demands made on them if they want to gain meagre state benefits.

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

I was just a regular kid in poverty, struggling.

I've experienced poverty and plenty, and there's a lesson to be learned when you're brought up in poverty.

He is now rising from affluence to poverty.

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

We oppose the benefit cap. We oppose social cleansing. We will bring the welfare bill down by controlling rents and boosting wages, not by impoverishing families and socially cleansing our communities.

In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.

Poverty may be the mother of crime, but lack of good sense is the father.

Where the despair of loneliness and poverty haunts every hour, the optimism to embark on new projects cannot find a place to alight on the brain's cortex. Poverty itself is an enormous obstacle to an enlightened and enlightening - not to say healthy - old age.

The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits - food stamps, housing subsidies and the like - if their income goes up.

I couldn't do it at all. I was never really good at it, but I can't imagine what it can be like as a fortunate person not having to deal with it. I mean, people of all ages, not just my age, 25, 35, all the way down the line.

When you talk about war on poverty it doesn't mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today.

The poor prey on one another because their lives offer no hope and communicate the tragic message to these human beings that they have no possibility to attain a decent standard of living.

I grew up in an all-black neighbourhood in Decatur, Georgia - a kinda lower-middle-class area.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

How can a man help breaking the law when he don't have money to live on?

I come from Main Street, from a small town that's really depressed.

For people on social assistance, the loss of free dental care, prescription drugs and subsidized housing can greatly outweigh additional income from working. We've all heard the stories.

Unemployment is a great tragedy. The man who goes about hopelessly seeking work in order to earn bread for his children is a living reproach to civilization.

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.