David K. Shipler Quotes

The jobs crisis has reached a boiling point, which is why we see Occupy Wall Street protestors crying out for an America that lets all of us reach for the American Dream again - a dream that says if you work hard and play by the rules, you can have a good life and retire with dignity.

When Americans are faced with the prospect that they can never earn their way to wealth, they have two choices: to rebel against the system, or to settle into depressed complacency.

Poverty us no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.

I myself am from a very poor background; I experienced firsthand poverty in this country, and that is not unrelated to my desire, from the moment I became president, to make a priority of poverty reduction in this country.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.

Work and pray, live on hay, you'll get pie in the sky when you die.

There's no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty.

If you work, you should not be poor.

I've seen a lot of poverty - coming up as a young child, lost hopes and dreams and people that never had a chance to have a decent quality of life. I believe we can do a lot greater than that.

For a good part of my childhood, we were super poor and lived in government housing. I don't characterize the American dream as being successful and having a lot of material wealth to show for it. I did fine without it for a really long time.

I feel sympathy for the working class lad. I've always championed about ticket prices and try to equate that to people's salaries.

The hardest work in the world is being out of work.

Income inequity has to be addressed.

I avoid going through places where there's too much poverty.

We do not accept that ours will ever be a nation of haves and have-nots. We must always be a nation of haves and soon-to-haves.

I've spent so many years talking about poverty and economic justice, I'm strongly tempted to get biblical. Jesus' teachings are so radical; they're just insanely generous and apocalyptic. Christians become more fascinated by the dead Jesus. They don't like the living Jesus.

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.

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

Where the despair of loneliness and poverty haunts every hour, the optimism to embark on new projects cannot find a place to alight on the brain's cortex. Poverty itself is an enormous obstacle to an enlightened and enlightening - not to say healthy - old age.

John Kerry believes in an America where hard work is rewarded.

No person can maximize the American Dream on the minimum wage.

In the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works a full time job should have to live in poverty. That's a fundamental value proposition, an article of faith in our country that I know an overwhelming majority of Americans agree on.

Today a minimum wage earner has to work a day and a half just to pay for a full tank of gas. That is simply shameful.

Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.

Imagine a society in which there were neither rich nor poor. What evils, afflictions, sorrows, disorders, catastrophes, disasters, tribulations, misfortunes, agonies, calamities, despair, desolation and ruin would be unknown to man!