Geoff Dyer Quotes

It is unacceptable that someone can work full time - and work hard - and not be able to lift themselves out of poverty.

Too many jobs don't pay enough to get by, let alone get ahead.

It is shameful that millions of Americans are suffering the economic injustice of working a full-time job and earning a wage that leaves them below the poverty line.

Americans shouldn't have to hold down two or three jobs to make ends meet.

Workers on the edge of poverty are essential to America’s prosperity, but their well-being is not treated as an integral part of the whole. Instead, the forgotten wage a daily struggle to keep themselves from falling over the cliff. It is time to be ashamed.

The average family earning minimum wage spends 141 percent of their income struggling to meet basic needs - food, shelter, clothing.

Nobody who works 40 hours a week should be living in poverty.

I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty - they are not out on the street; they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata.

I was very poor and I was a waitress, and it's hard to be a poor waitress in New York.

I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people.

There is nothing worse than being ashamed of parsimony or poverty.

In Latin America, you don't do things for the money because there is no money.

In reality, most of America's poor work hard, often in two or more jobs.

Does anyone really believe it is possible to make even the most basic ends meet on $5.15 an hour?

Nobody who works 40 hours a week should have to live in poverty.

People who work full-time in America should not have to live in poverty - simple as that. Too many jobs don't pay enough to get by, let alone get ahead. Too many people are finding the rungs on the ladder of opportunity further and further apart.

The bottom line is that five million low-income Americans working full time for minimum wage, deserve a raise.

Put all other sufferings on one side of the scale, and poverty on the other, and poverty would be heavier.

Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour are hard to resist. Fortunately, such families do not exist.

Wealth is far away. Poverty is near.

Nobody who works full time should have to live in poverty.

Poverty is terror. Having your Social Security threatened is terror. Having your livelihood as an elderly person slowly disappearing with no replenishment is terror.

It's wrong that so many hardworking people - people working full-time, or even multiple jobs - need public assistance just to survive.

America's vast population of working poor can only get so poor before even Walmart is out of reach.

Coronavirus has exposed for all what many of us already knew - some of our most important workers have barely enough to live on, and millions are condemned to financial insecurity, inequality and food poverty.