Kevin Barry Quotes

Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime.

As London is the greatest of all cities, there is naturally the greatest amount of human wretchedness to be seen concentrated within it; wretchedness too, that is made to look still more wretched, simply from the fact of its being associated with the most abundant comfort in the world.

Where is there beauty when you see deprivation and starvation?

The prosperous can not easily form a right idea of misery.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

He must be a bold man indeed who is confident that he knows what causes crime.

The most malign of all these dangers today is disregard and disobedience of law. Crime is increasing. Confidence in rigid and speedy justice is decreasing.

There was more violent crime among poor Irish immigrants in New York City 100 years ago than there is among blacks and Puerto Ricans today.

People without jobs cannot be expected to behave in a lawful, measured way.

If crime went down 100 percent it would still be 50 percent higher than it should be.

For the urban poor the police are those that arrest you. In almost any slum there is a vast conspiracy against the forces of law and order.

Every year, I hear about Thanksgiving. Who do one give thanks to? ... And who is giving thanks? What are they giving thanks for? For lots of poverty that's on the earth and lots of war that is a-rumoring all over the earth? For lots of people who die daily and the crime that multiply?

Crime is out of control in Baltimore City.

One of my friends is serving 33 years. Armed robbery. Those are the things you should rap about. I don't think you should glorify it at all. I don't really glorify it. I just talk about it. There's nothing special about that life.

It’s scandalous when one thinks about the people who live in a world in which they need not be hungry, in which they need not die without medical care, in which they need not be illiterate, they need not feel hopeless and miserable so much of the time, and yet they are.

It's outrageous to line your pockets off the misery of the poor; It's outrageous, the crimes some human beings must endure.

It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

Poverty does not produce unhappiness: It produces degradation.

Poverty, for me, is synonymous with degradation.

Nearly all inmates are drawn from the ranks of the powerless and the poor. A child of privilege frequently receives the benefit of the doubt; a child of poverty seldom does.

The reality is that capital punishment in America is a lottery. It is a punishment that is shaped by the constraints of poverty, race, geography and local politics.

Law and order is one of the steps taken to maintain injustice.

The time will come when all people will view with horror light way in which society and its courts of law now take human life; and when that time comes, the way will be clear to device some better method of dealing with poverty and ignorance and their frequent byproducts, which we call crime.

Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soulless army of human prey.

You would not easily guess All the modes of distress Which torture the tenants of earth; And the various evils, Which like so many devils, Attend the poor souls from their birth.