William Julius Wilson Quotes

The poor will never cease out of the land.

Poverty is the frontier we have to be able to cross.

To deal with radicalism and extremism, we need to deal with economic inequality. This is what I learned from my experience in Solo and then in Jakarta.

Yet today our splendid theory of government is confronted by a great peril. We have become blind to evils that menace us. We are confronted with glutted markets and idle labor. It is a condition that makes it possible for a few men to become landlords of a proud city like this while God's poor are packed in the slums. Such a condition is not only a menace to Republican institutions, but a travesty upon the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Poverty is a corrosive brew, capable of eating away at the underpinnings of democratic life itself.

Nobody talks about the poor. Everybody talks about the middle class and just kinda want to ignore that the poor exist. And you cannot ignore that they exist if you want to help them.

The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.

Poverty is the fundamental cause of most of the physical, moral and economic ills of humanity.

Poverty is the openmouthed relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society. And it is hell enough.

Without an advocate for the poor, without a new state of mind in America, the country lies on the brink of anarchy.

The second truism that we must understand is that poverty does not create our social problems, our social problems create our poverty.

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

We cannot afford to leave the poor behind.

For as long as our people are held hostage by controllable socio-economic forces, we cannot afford to be indifferent to the ravages of poverty in all its dimensions and ramifications.

It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.

The poor are discussed as this homogeneous mash, like porridge. The idea that they might be individuals, and be where they are for very different, diverse reasons, again seems to escape some people.

A shining city is perhaps all the President [Ronald Reagan] sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there's another part to the shining city. In this part of the shining city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, and more people who need help and can't find it.

The needs of the poor take priority over the desires of the rich

We are undemocratic, then, in our religion, as is proved by our efforts to “raise” the poor.

There is not enough wealth in the cities to redistribute it from those who are wealthy to those who are poor.

Who takes the blame: the leader who talks of poverty but lives in luxury, or the poor who choose a leader of that type?

Only the poor are forbidden to beg.

We should remember the poor.

When I was a young fellow I was very much disturbed by there being some people with lots of money and lots of people with no money.

The high price, therefore, which is so much complained of by the poor, has essentially mitigated their distress by bringing down to their level two or three millions more, and making them almost equal sharers in the pressure of the scarcity.