Theresa Rebeck Quotes

Crimes are more often committed out of fear than wickedness. People live frightened, desperate lives.

You've got a beautiful country with so many beautiful people and so many beautiful things happening and stuff like that lets it down. I feel sad for them.

Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime.

Now we just showin' and provin' that there's a ghetto everywhere you go.

Slavery is no more sinful, by the Christian code, than it is sinful to wear a whole coat, while another is in tatters, to eat a better meal than a neighbor, or otherwise to enjoy ease and plenty, while our fellow creatures are suffering and in want.

As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.

He must be a bold man indeed who is confident that he knows what causes crime.

If you are on the wrong side of society you can’t win.

People who are underprivileged have more to grieve and have more to overcome.

There never yet was, and never will be, a nation permanently great, consisting, for the greater part, of wretched and miserable families.

There's not a lot of hope coming from the inner city.

Ultraconservatism is, to me, so illogical. Everywhere you go, conservatives want to cut, cut, cut, cut - cut money for powerless people. So, that's the biggest problem I have with them.

The endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

If the market is left to sort matters out, social injustice will be heightened and suffering in the community will grow with the neglect the market fosters.

Poverty is unnecessary.

Nobody is poor unless he stand in need of justice.

Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself.

You grow up in America and you're told from day one, 'This is the land of opportunity.' That everybody has an equal chance to make it in this country. And then you look at places like Harlem, and you say, 'That is absolutely a lie.'

I was very sensitive to the environment around, and this disparity in people, seeing beggars and laborers not paid well, used to disturb me. So these emotions in these roles came very naturally to me.

If there is technological advance without social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery.

I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.

Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.

I've lived places these guys can't defecate in.

As of today, we do not need expert reports by the authoritative analytical institutions to realise that the reasons for such a situation in our community lie in global inequality, poverty and illiteracy.