Robert Hass Quotes

Environment, homelessness, infrastructure and immigration - I'm very focused on all four, which are critical to the success of Los Angeles.

Imagine a safe city with all the affordable housing we need, a city that uses its resources to help lift the marginalized up and into stability. This is the Portland I imagine. This is the Portland I dream about every single day.

Poverty can't be an excuse for bad teaching, but teaching can't be the only thing we do to combat poverty.

I was aware that a quarter of the children in the country are born in poverty, and that the condition of public schools in California was disastrous.

Neither the Destruction of the Ninth Ward Nor the South Bronx Was Inevitable

If poverty is a disease that infects the entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat those symptoms in isolation . We have to heal that entire community.

Poverty isn’t solved with donations.

Climate change and global poverty are two sides of the same coin. Both challenges must be addressed together. If we fail on one, we will also fail on the other.

I will be asking my network to lead a discussion on the issues of class, race, energy, the environment, disaster planning, Iraq -- all those things and more. This encompasses so many of the major issues of our time.

I think it's a scandal what has been happening in the school system so far as lower income classes. The dropout rates, the illiteracy rate, you know literacy in the United States was a lot higher in 1890 than it is now.

I teach at Harvard, and focusing on understanding this problem on a national level is a big priority of mine right now - where evictions are going up and down, what cities are actually instituting policies that work, what housing insecurity is doing to our cities, neighbourhoods, our kids.

The church should lead on issues of housing and affordability.

We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.

I want to make a city that can run smoothly with anyone in charge, even without a mayor in place.

I have been a policymaker proven in tackling some very complex social issues on the municipal level here in Boston.

Creating sustainable jobs means doubling down on Baltimore's formidable strengths.

Men, age 25 to 55, the labor-force participation rate is down 10%. That's unbelievable. There are 35,000 dying of opioids every year. Seventy percent of kids age 17 to 24 can't get into the US military because of health or education. Obesity, diabetes, reading and writing. Is that the society we wanted? No. We should be working on these things, acknowledge the flaws we have, and come up with solutions. Not Democrat. Not Republican. Not knee-jerk.

The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.

The fight against poverty and hunger must be fought constantly and on many fronts, especially in its causes.

I'm not sticking up for white kids - I'm going to have a barrage of hate mail - but it's true. If you're poor, you're really poor.

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

Pollution and overuse of resources stem directly from the failure of government to defend private property. If property rights were to be defended adequately, we would find that here, as in other areas of our economy and society, private enterprise and modern technology would come not as a curse to mankind but as its salvation.

If this understanding of the good news of Jesus prevailed among Christians, the belief that Jesus’s message is about how to get somewhere else, you could possibly end up with a world in which millions of people were starving, thirsty, and poor; the earth was being exploited and polluted; disease and despair were everywhere; and Christians weren’t known for doing much about it. If it got bad enough, you might even have people rejecting Jesus because of how his followers lived. That would be tragic.

The environmental movement could do a better job incorporating the message about the connection between poverty and environmental degradation, and building that message at the grassroots level.

Money is not going to organize the disadvantaged, the powerless, or the poor. We need other weapons. That's why the War on Poverty is such a miserable failure. You put out a big pot of money and all you do is fight over it. Then you run out of money and you run out of troops.