Marian Anderson Quotes

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

When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one - it's the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky - in the big cities, too, for that matter.

America’s real majority is suffering a minority complex of neglect. They have become the real foes of Negro rights, foreign aid, etc, because … they feel forgotten, at the second table behind the tightly organized smaller groups at either end of the U. S. spectrum.

The strength of the nation ultimately depends upon the strength of family and community.

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

People can be so apathetic. They continue to ignore the real people trapped in poverty and homelessness. It's almost maddening.

No matter where you from, there's ghettos all over the place.

The carrying power of a bridge is not the average strength of the pillars, but the strength of the weakest pillar. I have always believed that you do not measure the health of a society by GNP but by the condition of its worst off.

Throughout this country's history there have of course been systematic efforts to create an official underclass.

I think we've made tremendous progress on racism. We've even made progress on war. We've made almost no progress on poverty.

All too often, government's response to social breakdown has been a classic case of 'patching' - a case of handing money out, containing problems and limiting the damage but, in doing so, supporting - even reinforcing - dysfunctional behaviour.

In the end, we may be hurting the very people we should be concerned about - the inner-city poor, those who already have to live with many risks in their daily lives, those who do not have clout here in Washington.

Inequality causes problems by creating fissures in societies, leaving those at the bottom feeling marginalized or disenfranchised.

Often, those with the most to lose as a result of a poor policy move are the most vulnerable and most marginalized. Those folks need a voice, and I will endeavor to be that voice.

Those who suffer are not those at the top, but are the less privileged members of society.

Hurricane Katrina was a disaster. It exposed the soft underbelly of America when it comes to race and class.

It is not healthy when a nation lives within a nation .... A nation cannot be confident of its tomorrow if its refugees are among its own citizens.

Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets ... the rich and the poor.

We will not settle for a state that will settle for an underclass.

Underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions.

… the submerged tenth

Those who are most desperate for change are those who are the most powerless to effect it.

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

Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solution to large collective problems, because those problems [to the have’s] no longer seem very collective. Inequality undermines democracy/

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.