Koko Taylor Quotes

A simple way to take measure of a country is to look at how many want in ... and how many want out.

$5 a day was what Mr. Ford said, and Negroes came hundreds of miles to line up outside his employment offices.

Why should I leave Ruleville, and why should I leave Mississippi? I go to the big city, and with the kind of education they give us in Mississippi, I got problems. I'd wind up in a soup line there.

Donald Trump's own mother Mary escaped the bone-crushing poverty of Scotland's remote Outer Hebrides for the promise of New York in 1929.

I will keep all our young people from having to abandon their towns and families for the other side of the border

With the laborers of England generally, does not the moral coercion of want subject their will as despotically to that of their employer, as the physical constraint does the soldier, the seaman, or the slave?

Tell my people to go West—there is no justice for them here.

Little America

A plantation seems a fit place for those ingenious spirits that being low in the world, are much clogged and oppressed about a livelihood. For the means of subsisting being easy there, they may have time and opportunity to gratify their inclinations, and thereby improve science and help nurseries of people

In your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society. The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time

The deeper purpose of democratic government is to assist as many of its citizens as possible - especially those who need it most - to improve their conditions of life, to retain all personal liberty which does not adversely affect their neighbors, and to pursue the happiness which comes with security and an opportunity for recreation and culture.

As income inequality increases, social mobility falls.

The great mass of our poor white population begin to understand that they have rights, and that they, too, are entitled to some of the sympathy which falls upon the suffering. They are fast learning that there is an almost infinite world of industry opening before them, by which they can elevate themselves and their families from wretchedness and ignorance to competence and intelligence..

I have found out in later years we [his family] were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn't know it then.

America just works better when more people have a chance to live their dreams

What everyone has always wanted in this country, what most came here for, was to get away from all those others who smell bad, are sleeping in a shanty, and are eating fatback and are going to loaf tomorrow because there is no job to go to.

In the 1960s, if you could save $500, you had enough to move to another city and start a new life.

When our forbears - yours and mine - came to America, they came because this country promised them something. It promised them an opportunity, nourished by education, not merely to grind for a bare living, but to strive for a good life.

We all understand that freedom isn't free. What Romney and Ryan don't understand is that neither is opportunity. We have to invest in it.

With every generation comes a new wave of hopefuls: small-town escapees, European refugees, disaffected Londoners.

For my parents, leaving the close social quarters of Abilene was like getting out of jail. They were not true West Texans; they had not come to love the unending monotony of mesquite barrens or the high, hot blue sky that made sunsets a matter of prayerful thankfulness.

Cotton was a force of nature. There's a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.

The fact that anyone lives in America is the single reason poverty is never a death sentence, and transforms it instead into - at worst - an obstacle on the path to a better life and road to freedom and success.

Soviet moviegoers gazed enviously on the jalopy that took the Joads from Oklahoma to California. The message Russians took from 'The Grapes of Wrath': even the poorest capitalists have cars!

The poor are an especially important resource for innovation when they have the bravery and pluck to get out of the poor places in which they're living.