Carolyn Chute Quotes

I remain deeply concerned about falling wages and the lack of good jobs for Americans. Too many of our citizens are either stuck in place or falling behind, and too often their needs are forgotten.

In some ways, people forget about average working people, and how they live their lives.

It's hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.

We say, pay talent well and genius generously, but pay well also the arm that toils; pay the needle, the saw, the spade, the hoe, the mop.

My grandfather was a Pullman porter, and my father put his way through college by cleaning floors at night in the libraries. I understand that working people are in some way the bedrock of my existence and the existence of many people here.

My dad was an autoworker, my mom was a clerk. Until I was thirty-five, I never made more than fifteen thousand dollars a year.

Back in the old days, you had to work. If you didn't work, you didn't get paid.

I grew up in a household that was a labor household. My dad was a Teamster and a milk truck driver. My mother was a secretary. Neither of them got through high school. But they worked hard and they gave me very, very important opportunities to go to school, get a good education.

You destroy the initiative of the working people if they don't feel they have a fighting chance to be a part of the American Dream.

Workers in decent jobs view the economy as unjust if they or their children have virtually no chance of climbing to a higher rung in the socioeconomic ladder.

Alas few socialists are either benevolent enough to work hard at these occupations out of benevolence or self-interested enough to work hard at them for money.

I've had two callers ask, 'Did you ever work for someone who is poorer than you are?' Their idea is it takes a rich person to give you a job because jobs are something that are given to you, an inferior, from on high.

I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

Traditionally the great men of our country have sprung from poor environments; that being so, it would appear we have long suffered from a severe lack of poverty.

When you grow up with a mother who has to wash dishes and clean hotel rooms, you know the importance of having a job, and you can't be without a job for any length of time, or you will be without anything.

I think the class divide is going to change. I think a lot more working class people are going to get published. It is really class ridden, literature.

I was poor. When you're poor you work, and when you're rich you expect somebody to hand it to you. So I think being reasonably poor is very good for people.

The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case.

In West Virginia, the most vulnerable people we have are people who get up every morning and go to work.

The most that somebody in Mexico City will get paid for a job in construction is 100 pesos a day.

America's leaders need to put their feet in the shoes of working Americans.

Young people deserve stable employment opportunities and not mountains of debt. When young people can access the middle class, America is strengthened.

It is harder for a poor man to be successful than it is for a rich man.

I work in a hospital as a patient transporter to make ends meet for my three kids.