Johan Norberg Quotes

Poverty is the deprivation of opportunity.

It is my conviction that becoming economically and socially vulnerable puts you at the mercy of people surrounding you. It is as if you no longer exist as a human being and are no longer worthy of respect.

Poverty is a result of lack of opportunity. Lack of opportunity is about being without power, without being in a position to make choices.

Silence and invisibility go hand in hand with powerlessness.

The white poor also suffer deprivation and the humiliation of poverty if not of color. They are chained by the weight of discrimination though its badge of degradation does not mark them. It corrupts their lives, frustrates their opportunities and withers their education. In one sense it is more evil for them because it has confused so many by prejudice that they have supported their own oppressors.

I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues … allow them a language as lousy as their life

Powerlessness and silence go together.

You know, some people got no choice, and they can never find a voice, to talk with that they can even call their own. So the first thing that they see, that allows them the right to be, why they follow it, you know, it's called bad luck.

When you deprive people of their right to live in dignity, to hope for a better future, to have control over their lives, when you deprive them of that choice, then you expect them to fight for these rights.

The oppressed never free themselves - they do not have the necessary strengths.

What causes terrorism is disrespect, a lack of justice, and poverty.

I do not believe that the hungry man should be treated as subversive for expressing his suffering.

The poor prey on one another because their lives offer no hope and communicate the tragic message to these human beings that they have no possibility to attain a decent standard of living.

There is nothing good to be had in the country, or if there is, they will not let you have it.

As long as I am nothing but a ghost of the civil dead, I can do nothing.

Waiting is the great vocation of the dispossessed.

The feeling of being an underdog, not belonging, is very much me. You harbour a little feeling of resentment towards the 'upper dog'.

This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.

What good to me is the festive garment of freedom when I am in a slave's smock at home?

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!

Speak not of liberty — poverty is slavery.

The role of the inhabitants of the American hemisphere has for centuries been purely passive. Politically they were nonexistent. We are still in a position lower than slavery, and therefore it is more difficult for us to rise to the enjoyment of freedom.

The one without a sword gets humiliated.

Poverty is no disgrace, but it's no honor either.

A population sodden with drink, steeped in vice, eaten up by every social and physical malady, these are the denizens of darkest England ... the submerged tenth: Is it then beyond the reach of the nine-tenths in the midst of whom they live.