Matthew Desmond Quotes

Poverty is a corrosive brew, capable of eating away at the underpinnings of democratic life itself.

When you come from desperate poverty, and that's exactly what I come from, you know that nonsenses are not to be tolerated. I'm not sure who gains from chaos, but I know it's not the poor folks in the council flats. The politics of vindictiveness is never, ever anything like a solution.

The poor are discussed as this homogeneous mash, like porridge. The idea that they might be individuals, and be where they are for very different, diverse reasons, again seems to escape some people.

We will not settle for a state that will settle for an underclass.

… the submerged tenth

If you people can’t afford to live in our town, then you’ll just have to leave.

Problems of persistent poverty cannot be addressed unless they are acknowledged.

Poverty is sexist.

Poverty is a relationship that involves a lot of folks, rich and poor alike. I was looking for something that brought a lot of different people in a room. Eviction does that, embroils landlords and tenants, lawyers and social workers.

Everyone's seen poverty - well, most have.

Poverty is the openmouthed relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society. And it is hell enough.

There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

The endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society.

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.

American society as a whole can never achieve the outer-reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair.

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 was discriminated against because I was Jewish, Italian, black and Puerto Rican. But maybe the worst prejudice I experienced was against the poor. I grew up on welfare and often had to move in the middle of the night because we couldn't pay the rent.

Now we just showin' and provin' that there's a ghetto everywhere you go.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

There are people in whole parts of our cities who are being totally left behind and disregarded. They are unheard. They are told they are unneeded by this economy. And that extreme poverty breeds conditions for extreme violence.

The poor have to labour in the face of the majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

Poverty is everyone's problem. It cuts across any line you can name: age, race, social, geographic or religious. Whether you are black or white; rich, middle-class or poor, we are ALL touched by poverty.

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.

This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.

To deal with radicalism and extremism, we need to deal with economic inequality. This is what I learned from my experience in Solo and then in Jakarta.