Jim DeMint Quotes

Some say economics has all kinds of good tools and techniques, but it has an absence of interesting problems. I look around the world, and I see all kinds of interesting, important problems we ought to solve with the tools we have.

Stark inequality, poverty, and unemployment are driving increased social unrest and, consequently, social and economic risk. Environmental deterioration may well intensify social inequality.

Our time has experienced greater technological progress than ever existed before, and yet we are faced with the fact that world-wide poverty, hunger, death of children, unemployment, misery and the destruction of nature have not abated but rather to some extent increased. Many peoples are threatened with economic ruin, social disarray, political marginalization and national collapse.

The reigning model of economic globalization threatens earth’s life systems, undermines cultural integrity and diversity, and endangers the lives of many who are poor in order that some might consume exorbitantly and a few accumulate vast wealth.

We live on a planet of limited resources - an abstract notion for some of the world's population, but for many of the poorest and most vulnerable, those limits are all too real.

The fact is that the rich are getting richer while the poor are being left behind. Women remain under-represented in boardrooms and under-engaged in the global workforce. Environmental change is leaving the poorest countries vulnerable. Voters are becoming more and more politically polarised and partisan.

L.A. burns, and so many other cities smolder, waiting for the hose that will flood gasoline over the coals, and we listen to politicians who fuel our hate and our narrow views and tell us it's simply a matter of getting back to basics while they sit in their beachfront properties and listen to the surf so they won't have to hear the screams of the drowning.

Without an advocate for the poor, without a new state of mind in America, the country lies on the brink of anarchy.

Watching the scenes out of New Orleans, if you turn down the sound it could be the Sudan or any Third World country. But it's not. it's the United States of America.

I travel around the world, experiencing every language, every religion... some places where there's just no reason to smile, because their lives are so difficult.

The poor prey on one another because their lives offer no hope and communicate the tragic message to these human beings that they have no possibility to attain a decent standard of living.

Wealth and vegetation go together, and that exacerbates environmental injustice. The poor bear the burden of degraded environments.

Poverty and lack of education are ruining our planet.

The 1 to 2 billion poorest in the world, who don't have food for the day, suffer from the worst disease: globalization deficiency. The way globalization is occurring could be much better, but the worst thing is not being part of it. For those people, we need to support good civil societies and governments.

Inequality is a terrible waste of time, a waste of people's resources.

The few men who possess the wealth of the material things of the earth at the present time are not truly happy.

No one can say how long the process of human extinction might take, but as it proceeds, the same global order will prevail that always prevails: rich nations will find ways to protect themselves and make themselves comfortable, while the poor nations and the poor people of the planet will suffer.

I've always stood on one fact - that all over the world, there are only two things, the Establishment and the poor people. The poor people are a massive majority and across the world they are exploited in different kinds of ways. The Establishment depends on exploiting raw materials and the poor.

It is conflict overall that mires people in poverty. That is the first law of development.

I began my work in the '70s, teaching at a university in Bangladesh, and these economic theories that I had learned stopped ringing true for me, as I saw the misery of people living all around me.

Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.

America is the one rich country with the biggest slums, the least democratic and least developed health system, and the most niggardly attitude against its old people.

What will it profit this country if we... put our man on the Moon by 1970 and at the same time you can't walk down Woodward Avenue in this city without fear of some violence?

What kind of America do people want to leave for their children? What horrors are down the road, stuff that was unthinkable 30 years ago?

I like globalization; I want to say it works, but it is hard to say that when six hundred million people are slipping backwards.