Jane Fonda Quotes

It's about time we make the well-being of our young people more important than ideology and politics. As a country, we benefit from investing in their future by investing in teen pregnancy prevention.

The great mass of the poor in countries are become an hereditary race, and it is next to impossible them to get out of that state of themselves

Certainly, by providing individuals coming out of institutions with ways to become productive citizens, we reduce recidivism. What that means is we reduce crime. There are fewer victims when individuals have options - when they have job skills, when they have life skills, we break the cycle of children following their parents into institutions.

Contrary to what President Obama said in his inaugural address, going on Medicare and food stamps does not strengthen us. Just ask people who are fourth-generation welfare recipients.

There is definitely places in America where, if you're born into that environment, your chances of getting out are really, really limited.

Giving a poor person money keeps them poor.

It ought to be considered a reward for good citizenship and good parenting to get into public housing.

If you are a pregnant teenage poor girl, you will not likely ever get out of poverty. Nor will your children. Birth control can be the most cost effective anti-poverty possibility that we have.

Dick and I became increasingly committed to helping other parents - parents from low-income families in particular.

We have to take real steps to break down the culture of benefit dependency and failure which blights too many urban areas.

When you live in a poor neighborhood, you are living in an area where you have poor schools. When you have poor schools, you have poor teachers. When you have poor teachers, you get a poor education. When you get a poor education, you can only work in a poor-paying job. And that poor-paying job enables you to live again in a poor neighborhood. So, it's a very vicious cycle.

Generational poverty, most of us don't know what that means.

The children of those people [long term unemployed] have less education, earn less, have higher unemployment. The problems are visited upon the children

Because of the British Welfare State …, I was never hungry…. The schools I attended were free and actually acted as ladders of mobility for those randomly given the skills in the genetic lottery of life to climb them.

The government’s unprecedented expenditures failed to bring about the decline in poverty that Johnson had promised. Instead, they made things worse.

Today, if you were raised poor, you're just as likely to stay poor as you were 50 years ago.

Parents, teachers, and other school staff need the tools to help these young people early in their lives. And the earlier, the better. It is proven that early action prevents problems later in life.

I don't want to sound Pollyannish about this. I understand that poverty is never just poverty. It's often this collection of maladies, this compounded adversity. I'm not naive about the problem. But I think that stable, steady housing is one of the surest footholds we could have on the road to financial stability.

This is what I think about poverty: why waste the potential of people? You never know what you've got going in society unless you give people a chance.

The problem is not that the U.S. economy won't be able to take care of its citizens - it is that taking away benefits, creating intergenerational warfare, and scapegoating will make for very difficult and bad politics. This is a tragedy that we can see coming. Early action would be relatively painless.

I've seen a lot of poverty - coming up as a young child, lost hopes and dreams and people that never had a chance to have a decent quality of life. I believe we can do a lot greater than that.

My family has been poor and working-class for generations. And we live - I live in this really small community in Southern Mississippi where you don't evacuate, and you have never evacuated because there are too many people in your family to evacuate.

My family wasn't involved in the college. They were more of just your 'white trash' kind of family. And so I have that kind of background, but I always kind of aspired to be something else, and I made a lot of different friends over the years that were passing through.

Nobody would deny that if someone was a billionaire in 1962, his billions are going to affect all of his descendants. The reverse is also true. The lack of education, material, and finances for a slave are going to affect the descendants of that individual as well.

Politicians seem desperate to appeal to their respective versions of the so called 'middle class,' unable to empathise with the precariat and eager to dream up fresh and tougher sanctions against society's wounded.