Mac Davis Quotes

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.

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.

Slums could be thought of as the development of a special organ, or they could be thought of as a tumor that's grown, and in some ways is unhealthy and could ultimately lead to the city's destruction. My own feeling is that slums are probably a bit of both.

It's important for me to go back into the ghetto, where I'm from. I still get my oxygen from there. I don't live in the ghetto anymore, but every time I go back, I'm still seeing the same things that I lived.

I was born and raised in the ghetto, on welfare, two minutes from homeless.

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

What a miserable place a city is for poor people.

Our rich people are not an ethnic minority. A poor person in Tennessee or Arkansas can say, "I'm not wealthy, but maybe my son or my daughter can grow up to be Bill Gates, or Bill Clinton." That's absolutely not true in countries like Zimbabwe, or Burma, or Indonesia, or Bolivia, where the majority of the people look around and they say, "Everybody who's rich belongs to a different ethnic group.

If this is the second century of slumdom, it is also the 14th year of a self-governed state, when the babies of 1916 are still, as men and women, crying for a happier life for their babies, crying for a simple shelter.

It is one thing to listen in perfunctory fashion to tales of overcrowding tenements, and it is quite another actually to see what that overcrowding means, some hot summer night, by even a single inspection during the hours of darkness.

A man of letters never objects to a slum. He sharpens his pen there.

If we want to save our country, we must all realize that the breakdown of our culture is trapping millions of people in a cycle of poverty and dependence, and together, we have to do something about it.

We don't know: some little black boy or girl growing up in the inner city might grow up and cure cancer for all of us - if we let them do it.

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.

Newark faces real challenges.

Urbanisation, poverty, youth unemployment are leading to violence-prone cities.

In Chicago, a lot of people don't really got nothing to live for. Everybody can't ball. Everybody can't rap. Nobody is really doing those activities. There's nothing to do but the streets.

Growing up in bad neighborhoods, you see and experience a lot.

I'm from Gary, Indiana, and everybody's damn near at the poverty level. It's a rough city to grow up in, and it's a modern-day ghost town.

Spanish Harlem is like every ghetto in America. There's every distraction possible. To make it up out of there is really a task itself.

Those inner-cities, they're not giving kids a chance. They're not giving the teachers a chance to really help those kids. They're making it real tough. You're either gonna help or you're hurting your own country.

When I hear stories about the number of kids that have been lost to violence, where families grow up teaching kids 'duck and cover' long before they learn their ABC's or their colors, I know there is something profoundly wrong in our city.

Gothenburg is the Baltimore or Liverpool or Marseille of Sweden - plagued by the death of wharfs and other industries, and with complex segregation of the populace from southern Europe, which once brought in a labor force that suddenly found itself living in remote projects without jobs.

I met a number of young, striving, enterprising people in cities like Aligarh and Hubli. But the mental landscape of these towns is out of sync with their reality. Many of these towns are hellholes.

Where I come from, the estates are not so nice. It is a bit gritty.