Grace Paley Quotes

Living in Portland, which is a predominantly white city, the privilege and the luxury to be able to obsess over a certain kind of minutia, that I think, if you did not have that privilege, would never be bothersome. When people are worried about whether "local" means 100 miles, or 50 miles, or 10 miles from a grocery store, I just think, "Wow. What a privilege it is to have that as a major concern in your life." As opposed to, "Can we afford food tonight?" Sometimes I'm just shocked at what becomes concerning in these kind of communities.

You need to think about the system that you live in and the comforts that you have. But the comforts that you have that are causing the discomforts of a massive amount of people around the world.

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.

I'm not one of these people who thinks everyone born into privilege should wear sack cloth and ashes. But it's something I wrestle with. I know a lot of people who live below the poverty level and have for a long time and it makes them uneasy to think they'll have to interact with people from different economic levels. Everyone has some sort of load put on them, whatever the circumstances they're born into.

Can princes born in palaces be sensible of the misery of those who dwell in cottages?

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

The people who are getting rich can't imagine that the world is not a better place.

It seems to me that large numbers of people are now paying attention to poverty and that large numbers now understand that blaming the poor and the insecure for being poor and insecure is as unseemly as is schoolyard bullying. In that realization lies hope for a reinvigorated discourse around poverty and inequity in modern-day America.

A lot of the things that we think of as being racial differences are really class differences in America.

All these people talking about morality should just take a walk downtown. They don't want to go downtown because instantly they see homeless people and they don't want to.

While economic development [in Egypt] made a few people rich, it left many more worse off. As people felt less and less free, they also felt less and less provided for.

If the same family were always on the bottom, then you'd have big resentments. But if DuPonts go down and Pampered Chef up, [that's good]. That much churn makes people think the system is fairer. Buffett: We don't like churn now, but we liked it more 30-40 years ago.

I think the big problem is you have a vicious cycle of wealth and power in America that's just gotten completely out of control and you've seen it in politics.

When people talk about people being left behind - middle wages have not gone up for years, and we should recognize that, and there I think we need growth and skills - but there are these other people who have been left behind. When I say out loud, "Fifty percent of inner-city schoolkids do not graduate from high school," that is a national catastrophe. We should be ringing the alarm bells. It's not fair.

Inequality is not just an issue between individuals, between classes, between regions. It's between urban and rural.

Though the rich of this earth find no difficulty in creating misery, they can't bear to see it.

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.

Men aren't able to find jobs anymore, and they're withdrawing from society, essentially creating a matriarchy. For the upper social classes, marriage is still a successful model, but for poorer people it's not.

There are certain neighborhoods in America like that - like in Pittsburgh, where I'm from - where people wouldn't think it's even livable for human beings. Those are the areas that I connect with because I come from places like that, and I just think it's interesting how the rest of the world acts like it doesn't exist. But a lot of the best things come from there.

Of course I had the parallel of having the early years of my life being spent during apartheid, and then having a lot of awful poverty going on around me while I lived in this bubble of middle-classness, but I was a child, and I only really started to (I hope) understand all of that fairly recently.

A lot of people don't know the culture shock of how you can be in a rich area and then be in poverty. People don't know how different it is over there.

We think we have got freedom of the press. When one millionaire has ten newspapers and ten million people have no newspapers - that is not freedom of the press.

Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.

Nobody cares that Mitt Romney is rich. It’s Romney’s inability to understand the institutional advantage that he gains from the government’s tax code largesse that’s a little offensive to people. Especially considering Romney’s view on anyone else who looks to the government for things like, I don’t know, food and medicine.

I think there should be an Occupy Gallifrey. Because 0.000001% of the people have 99.99999% of the Time.