Anand Giridharadas Quotes

My first job, which I had to take when not more than fifteen, was assistant to a fruit peddler. It seemed all right to me until a little girl told me snootily, 'We never deal with peddler!' Thereupon I resigned, ashamed of what I was doing.

The Negro today perhaps has more political power than ever before and he is worse off than ever before. It is not votes but dollars that count in this civilization.

We will continue to move from misery to poverty with dignity.

I may forget my dignity, but you may not.

We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.

Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, I see the lords of humankind pass by.

Better to be disliked than pitied.

If a group of people feels that it has been humiliated and that its honour has been trampled underfoot, it will want to express its identity and this expression of an identity will take different shapes and forms.

Nowadays nothing but money counts: a fortune brings honors, friendships; the poor man everywhere lies low.

We continue to fight for good jobs that pay well and jobs that last. Helping to get folks back to work is about helping them to regain their dignity and pride. That's what families care about.

What greater reassurance can the weak have than that they are like anyone else?

It is impossible to forget the sense of dignity which marks the hour when one becomes a wage-earner... I felt that I had suddenly acquired value to myself, to my family, and to the world.

Humility is a grace that shines in a high condition but cannot, equally, in a low one because a person in the latter is already, perhaps, too much humbled.

Could we do without the social safety net, without Social Security, without Medicare, without farm subsidies, without unemployment compensation, without school lunch programs, without housing assistance? Of course we could. But we would not be a civilized society and we would not be an American nation any of us would be proud of.

Home is where my dignity lives, not necessarily where my ancestors put down roots.

No sir, tho’ I was born and bred in England, I can dare to be poor, which is the only thing now—a—days men are asham’d of.

The notion that all human beings born into this world enter at birth into a definite social and economic classification, in which classification they must remain permanently through life, is wholly false and fatal to a progressive civilization.

Rich people are powerful in wealth but few in votes.

Dignity and plenty instead of humility and poverty.

I am a capitalist—a rich businessman and most of you are not.

I do not believe that older Americans should be forced to live out their lives in poverty, their tiny savings destroyed by illness. Dependent upon their relatives. Feeling unwanted by their country.

We must preserve not only the bodies of the unemployed from destitution but also their self-respect, their self-reliance, and courage and determination.

You have power, rank, command, influence; we have wealth, the source both of our strength and weakness.

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live…. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.

The surrender of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledgment of inferiority..