Cornel West Quotes

Safety nets for the poor and disadvantaged are a must for any compassionate nation, but encouraging folks to go on the dole when not absolutely necessary is disgraceful.

The biggest problem is that the rich people paying the bills do not share the same goals as the poor people they are trying to help. The wealthy have weak incentives to get the right amount of the right thing to those who need it; the poor are in no position to complain if they don’t.

I don't think they [Congress] ought to balance their budget on the backs of the poor.

The poor will never cease out of the land.

The war on poverty had not been undertaken at the request of the poor.

To one American family out of four, the idea of capitalism as a benign system of comfort, dignity, and personal advance is only a myth, or worse, a bitter mockery.

Nobody talks about the poor. Everybody talks about the middle class and just kinda want to ignore that the poor exist. And you cannot ignore that they exist if you want to help them.

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

Poverty is the frontier we have to be able to cross.

Republicans have been accused of abandoning the poor. It's the other way around. They never vote for us.

When you talk about war on poverty it doesn't mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today.

One of the strangest things about life is that the poor, who need the money the most, are the ones that never have it.

We cannot afford to leave the poor behind.

Ours is not a poor country and even though we are now a poor people, there should be no room for the despondency that has settled on large sections of the population.

There was no welfare state, and people had to rely mainly on the Poor Law - that was all the state provided. It was very degrading, very humiliating. And there was a means test for receiving poor relief.

I often say that poverty needs no passport to travel.

The Clinton administration cared a lot about the middle class and the poor. But it also cared a lot - too much, in retrospect - about the rich.

So I really would like to see both parties respond to the poor with greater commitment. But I've got to tell you, the Democrats, I feel, are doing a better job in that respect than Republicans are.

You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

Republicans look after the rich, and Democrats focus on the needs of the middle class. Neither of them looks after the poor.

Never forget that there are rich people in poor countries and poor people in rich countries.

Those of us who have been economically successful cannot forget those who have not.

We should remember the poor.