Joycelyn Elders Quotes

An entire content of children growing up without any prospect but poverty.

Mothers born on relief have their babies on relief.

The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness and low self-esteem interact to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin.

I can't help but react to the painful realities of the two-tiered society we live in, where the signs of poverty and inequity are everywhere. Almost twenty five percent of our children live at or below the poverty line. We expect the no-option life cycle of the poor to be interrupted by the weak social safety net and then wonder why building more jails doesn't solve the problems.

On a cold and gray Chicago morning another little baby child is born in the ghetto, and his Mama cries.

The rage building up, generation after generation, among what has become a permanent underclass in many parts of the world cannot continue. We are desperately undereducating our children. In the United States, we are turning prison-building into the single largest urban industry. These are like toxic chemical factors any one of which could cause a raging fire. God help us if they begin to interact.

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.

You leap over the wall of one ghetto and find yourself in another ghetto.

We are told, over and over: "Get off welfare. Cut the umbilical cord to the Government." But when we try and pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, we're slapped back down.

Our rich people are not an ethnic minority. A poor person in Tennessee or Arkansas can say, "I'm not wealthy, but maybe my son or my daughter can grow up to be Bill Gates, or Bill Clinton." That's absolutely not true in countries like Zimbabwe, or Burma, or Indonesia, or Bolivia, where the majority of the people look around and they say, "Everybody who's rich belongs to a different ethnic group.

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

It is futile to speak of liberty as long as economic slavery exists … poverty is slavery!

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.

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

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

The chaos of poverty feeds on itself.

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

In some of the estates, there are generations of people who have been without work, so the environment and the example passed down generations is the normality of being without work.

God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little ... The trade unions, under the European system, destroy liberty ... I do not mean to say that a dollar a day is enough to support a workingman ... not enough to support a man and five children if he insists on smoking and drinking beer. But the man who cannot live on bread and water is not fit to live! A family may live on good bread and water in the morning, water and bread at midday, and good bread and water at night!

Transfer payments discourage the recipients from earning income in the present and from investing in their potential to earn income in the future. People respond to a reduced cost of idleness by choosing to be idle more often.

The number-one reason women say they returned to their abuser is financial insecurity. Often they have kids with them. They say half of the 66 million women and kids living in poverty in the US wouldn't be if women were just paid their full dollar. That's an enormous impact we could make on child hunger.

Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works.

70% of children born into poverty will never make it to the middle class. The uncomfortable truth is that there are now a number of other countries with as much or more opportunity than ours. In fact, more people in Canada go on to surpass the income of their parents than in the United States.

If they had $2.00 for food, they had to give $1.00 to the union. Otherwise, they would never get out of the trap of poverty. They would never have a union because they couldn't afford to sacrifice a little bit more on top of their misery.