Richard Rogers Quotes

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.

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

It is not squalid people who produce the squalid housing; it is the squalid housing that makes squalid people.

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.

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

The poor get bored the same as the rest of us. Their happiness might be as important to them as their health.

I have a lot of land. I bought it because I had a very strong feeling. I was in my early twenties, and I had grown up in Los Angeles and had seen that city slide off into the sea from the city I knew as a little kid. It lost its identity - suddenly there was cement everywhere and the green was gone and the air was bad - and I wanted out.

A lot of kids spent more time out of school than in, but I always loved school and thought it was my way out of Cleveland, and out of poverty.

When ghetto living seems normal, you have no shame, no privacy.

Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

I come from the bottom of the ladder. I'm from Norwich. Not many people seem to know about it.

I did not intend to stay; I had no experience in the United States - I may have been here less than 24 hours - but I knew I would never get inside there. And 'there' not being America necessarily, but that harmonious mode of living that some people are lucky enough to have in this country.

Other families who are poor do what they can to get out of it. My mother did not. She did not utilise her resources. She had a degree. There was something she could have done, but she actively, purposely refused that so we could have this absolutely authentic experience of the worst of capitalism: 'See? Look how bad capitalism is.'

I grew up in this poor place, with very limited circumstances, at about 16 years of age was sent by my family to work, and instead of remaining in the position into which I was sent, I somehow worked my way out of it without any help from anyone, just luck.

It was impossible for me to believe that conditions in Europe could be worse than they were in the Polish section of Chicago, and in many Italian and Irish tenements, or that any workshops could be worse than some of those I had seen in our foreign quarters.

I came from a very poor family and my main dream in life was to break out of this poverty.

I grew up with not a lot of money and I definitely shopped at Goodwill. But even in my most unfortunate state, I was really blessed compared to a lot of the rest of the world. I had a really great chance to follow my dreams and have them actually come true.

Lots of people have gone from public housing to do great things in the world and have a tremendous sense of duty to their fellow man because of it.

What's popular in places considered ghettos - whether that's the inner city or Appalachia - is having a decent quality of life.

As the years passed in my village, I witnessed poorly educated young men leaving to seek the greater comforts and liberations of big cities. I would see them on my visits to Delhi.

Growing up in New Orleans and just being in a poverty-stricken neighborhood gave me that same fire that Eazy had to separate himself from what could have ended up being such a bad situation.

The cost of living is going up and the chance of living is going down.

The important thing is the struggle everybody is engaged in to get better living conditions.

Poor children fare worse than rich children on just about everything that social scientists measure.

… poor people deserve access to food, education, housing, and medical services