Richard J. Daley Quotes

We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.

You cannot let men live like pigs …. We need not wait for the Millennium to get rid of the slum. We can do it now.

I think there's an element where people get very comfortable in their ghetto. Which is fair enough.

Because Katrina put it out there, no one can play the pretend game anymore that there isn't poverty and inequality in this country. The Millions More Movement - Katrina gives it added significance.

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

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

A ghetto can be improved in only one way; out of existence.

The slums will be but a memory.

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.

I just don't think the moon is going to be an adequate substitute for the fact that we haven't addressed ourselves to clearing up the slums.

We should concentrate our work not only to a separated housing problem but housing involved in our daily work and all the other functions of the city.

'Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream' is an intentionally angry film. How could it not be when the chance of an infant dying is five times greater on the Bronx Park Avenue than on Manhattan's Park Avenue just across the Harlem River?

In Rio, 1.4 million of the 6.3 million people live in favelas, or slums. They are all over the city, but favelas are not always a problem - sometimes they can be a solution, if you have the right public policies.

The slum is the measure of civilization.

I was a very poor young black boy in New Orleans, just a face without a name, swimming in a sea of poverty trying to survive.

I think it's good if areas get upgraded and gentrified, as long as the people who always lived there can stay. But they get pushed out to some place.

New Orleans is just a microcosm of Newark and Detroit and hundreds of other troubled urban locales.

You leap over the wall of one ghetto and find yourself in another ghetto.

I gained direct knowledge of the life of the poor in big towns: I have lived the narrowing mechanism of its conditioning and feared it.

I didn't say I wouldn't go into ghetto areas. I've been in many of them and to some extent I would say this; if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.

As a city, we have to face the reality that New York's minority communities experience a disproportionate share of violent crime.

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.

Poverty is an artificial, external imposition on a human being; it is not innate in a human being. And since it is external, it can be removed. It is just a question of doing it.

If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.

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.