Wayne Messam Quotes

We shouldn't be profiting from our students who are drowning in debt while giving a great deal to the banks. That's just wrong.

Everyday people are graduating from universities with crippling debt, stifling their opportunity for financial mobility, that is what's broken with this country.

... popular art has no chance of a healthy life, or, indeed, of a life at all, till we are on the way to fill up this terrible gulf between riches and poverty.

The old-fashioned idea is that responsibility falls upon those who borrow and lend. Money was not borrowed by campesinos, assembly plant workers, or slum-dwellers. The mass of the population gained little from borrowing, indeed often suffered grievously from its effects.

Students take out loans with the expectation that they will receive an education that sets them up for success - yet too many students are left with enormous debt from predatory institutions and no education to show for it.

Yes, there is a burden of financial insecurity. I don't think you find it in mood. Income is correlated with life satisfaction, so maybe you do find it in life satisfaction. You don't find it in mood, and I think it is very important.

You and I can be busy, and we take a vacation from work. You can't take a break from being poor. You can't say, 'Hey I've had enough of worrying about money, I'm just going to be rich for a couple of weeks until I've recovered.'

I listened to the students on campus in Plymouth, worried about their steadily deepening debts and how on earth they would ever escape them.

Short of genius a rich man cannot even imagine poverty.

The Occupy Wall Street protests at last suggest that America's wealth gap is once again becoming an organizing political principle in the country.

It is a sin to be poor.

College is part of the American dream. It shouldn't be part of a financial nightmare for families.

We cannot afford to leave the poor behind.

We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt.

The poor pay more, and that's one of the reasons people get trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder.

I have younger friends who are in this pinch where they feel they've been counted out before they've had a chance to prove themselves. They've inherited a lot of debt - not just student debt but environmental debt, political debt. They really feel squeezed.

The issue of wealth inequality is ... the great moral issue of our time.

We're moving more and more toward user fees, but the people who use social service programs obviously don't have the ability to pay for them.

Debt is more of a problem for Blacks than racism. Being in debt is being in slavery.

The distribution of wealth is just as important as its creation.

This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing.

We had particular policies in this country that resulted in the larger share of poverty that we have in African-American communities.

Economic inequality is not about food stamps and homeless shelters. It is about being a devotee of social justice and equality.

Higher education is meant to provide economic opportunity to Americans - not provide unscrupulous companies the opportunity to syphon off billions in federal taxpayer dollars unfairly.

Globalization in the aggregate generates wealth, no question. But it gets concentrated.