Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

Criminality is always the result of poverty. Countries that experience such a fundamental change as we have - we had the apartheid regime and must now develop a multicultural democracy - must necessarily pass through a phase of high crime rates.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

I think we're living in a world where society is very difficult.

The rich stick together; the poor and the marginalised are thrown together.

These political movements flourish on the margins of Turkish society because of poverty and because of the people's feeling that they are not being represented.

This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.

If the Negro in the ghetto must eternally be fed by the hand that pushes him into the ghetto, he will never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto.

Poverty is a corrosive brew, capable of eating away at the underpinnings of democratic life itself.

The ‘poor white’ is actually degraded; the mountain white is a person not yet graded up.

It has become impossible to deny or obscure the great chasm . . . between an elite that seizes modernity’s choicest fruits while disdaining older truths and uprooted masses, who, on finding themselves cheated of the same fruits, recoil into cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality.

In my view - which could be wrong, but it is my field - there is no better formula for social instability than to divide a society between two ascribed characteristics that are seen as opposite.

There is no room any more for the divisive agenda which has been sought to be foisted on the common man.

There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

Society is better off without certain people.

A poor man is like a foreigner in his own country.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.

Alas, the world has never known a sound social fabric, a fabric sound and clean to the core and kindly. For it has ever turned its back on Man.

We live in a very unequal society.

If you have extremes of haves and have-nots where the gap keeps growing, the have-nots group together and create social disorder, as they can't see a way out of their situation.

Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.

One of the things I keep coming back to in my writing is that society doesn't work on this mirror principle, you don't have an exact replica on the left of what you have on the right. It just doesn't work that way.

All over the world, children facing the challenges of poverty attend schools that aren't designed to meet their extra needs; across country lines, the lives of marginalized kids look far more similar than they do different.

Let's stop this American downward spiral.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.