Al Gore Quotes

In most slums and cities in developing states, population growth is outpacing the ability of the growth in pollution and sewage. Such unmet expectations in over-crowded cities can be the catalyst for civil conflict.

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

Five days in Nairobi slums changes you.

Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation.

What a miserable place a city is for poor people.

I know we haven't cleaned up all the slums, but I didn't create the slums, did I?

Look what we have built ... low-income projects that became worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.

If this is the second century of slumdom, it is also the 14th year of a self-governed state, when the babies of 1916 are still, as men and women, crying for a happier life for their babies, crying for a simple shelter.

It is one thing to listen in perfunctory fashion to tales of overcrowding tenements, and it is quite another actually to see what that overcrowding means, some hot summer night, by even a single inspection during the hours of darkness.

Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

Most people, if you live in a big city, you see some form of schizophrenia every day, and it's always in the form of someone homeless. 'Look at that guy - he's crazy. He looks dangerous.' Well, he's on the streets because of mental illness. He probably had a job and a home.

Not only does the proportion of the poor increase with the growth of the city, but their condition becomes more wretched.

I grew up in a semi-slum area in Gavipuram, Guttahalli.

I didn't say I wouldn't go into ghetto areas. I've been in many of them and to some extent I would say this; if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.

By 2050, seven out of ten people will live in cities, which will account for six billion people living in urban areas. That phenomenon is central to all the challenges humanity faces. If there is an issue to be addressed, then it is certainly happening in cities and therefore must be considered on an urban scale.

I've been in many of them and to some extent I would have to say this; if you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited.

There are thousands on thousands in New York who have no assignable home.

As London is the greatest of all cities, there is naturally the greatest amount of human wretchedness to be seen concentrated within it; wretchedness too, that is made to look still more wretched, simply from the fact of its being associated with the most abundant comfort in the world.

If life is hard on you, dwell in cities

In size and population Manchester is the second city in the United Kingdom, containing above four-score thousand inhabitants. Imagine this multitude crowded together in narrow streets, the houses all built of brick and blackened with smoke; frequent buildings among them as large as convents ... where you hear from within ... the everlasting din of machinery; and where, when the bell rings, it is to call wretches to their work instead of to their prayers…. if Dante had peopled one of his hells with children, here was a scene worthy to have supplied him with new images of torment

The mobs that held fearful sway in our city during the memorable outbreak of violence in the month of July, 1863, were gathered in the overcrowded and neglected quarters of the city. The closely packed houses where the mobs originated seemed to be literally hives of sickness and vice …. To walk the streets as we walked them, in those hours of conflagration and riot, was like witnessing the day of judgment, with every wicked thing revealed, every sin and sorrow blazingly glared upon, every hidden abomination laid before hell’s expectant fire.... Here disease in its most loathsome form propagates itself.

A third of the city's population of over two million people live under unsatisfactory conditions, many under distressing conditions, some under disgraceful conditions. For thousands home is a mockery. It consists of two or three small rooms of which but one is adequately lighted and often even not that one and none of which is adequately ventilated; rooms that in the hot summer day become an inferno of torture to little children, the sick, and the weak. For the persons living in these homes there is little privacy; there are no reticences; they must share the process of living with other families; they must use a common water closet [toilet]; they must get all the water they use from a common faucet in the public hall; the fire peril menaces them at all times …

The tendency is away from the farm and away from the rural districts ; the trend is toward the city, where the needy congregate and where crime becomes organized and where the Republic is stabbed

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