Bell Hooks Quotes

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society.

There's unrecognizable change happening in Britain. The life prospects and job prospects, particularly of working-class people, have been severely dented. Without anyone being asked.

People who are homeless, they're not all addicts. A lot of times, they're just people who, through something like losing their job or losing someone in their life, ended up on the streets. So much of our time is spent in cars that sometimes you need to look out of those windows. And you see that a dollar, 50 cents, whatever you have, may not mean much to you, but it means everything to people who are hungry and who are in need.

I've spent the last year listening to Americans, and the state of the union that George W. Bush lives in is very different from the state that most hardworking Americans are living in.

I had panels - roundtables in the district - and the stories that were told are really difficult to accept. People who have diabetes who can't get insurance because of a preexisting condition; others who were laid off and the have no place to turn.

First National Bank laid off 1,000 people; where do they go? There are no jobs for them. So we are having serious economic problems in this country. We are in a real economic crisis.

I'd go to, like, six different schools in one year. We were on welfare, and my mom never ever worked.

I think the state has some serious problems. Just look at the layoffs going on across the state, not just in Chicago. It affects the middle class. It pushes people down.

I can tell you that when I travel the state, when I talk to people, they are really struggling, in a very real way. They're losing their jobs, they're losing their homes, they're dealing with financial challenges.

In a packed programme tonight, we will be talking to an out-of-work contortionist who says he can no longer make ends meet.

Our businesses can't create jobs when they're losing revenue, and the unemployed can't apply for jobs when they can't pay their phone bill.

I've become a professional failure - in order to pay the mortgage I have to remain unemployed. Luckily, a disaster always seems to befall me at exactly the right moment.

I know what it's like to be shoveling to pay bills. I know what it's like to not have a job.

When I was a deacon, the ominous signs of the Great Depression began to appear. Tens of thousands lost their jobs. Money was scarce. Families had to do without. Some young people did not ask their mothers, 'What's for dinner?' because they knew all too well that their cupboards held very little.

After school, I got a job in a shop in Hollywood and shared an apartment with a friend. I promptly lost my job and got evicted from my apartment, and that happened several times.

Hurricane Katrina was a disaster. It exposed the soft underbelly of America when it comes to race and class.

As we lose manufacturing jobs across the country, the burden falls disproportionately on Black Americans.

l had a job, and if you had a job in the depression you were rich.

People without jobs cannot be expected to behave in a lawful, measured way.

The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

Poverty causes crime.

The great question, however, for the poor man is, or shortly will be, that of escape from competition with labor-saving machinery

What can he do who lacks the necessary work, if he comes to be unemployed? He has nothing but to let himself die of hunger. Then a few phrases of pity will thrown on his cadaver.

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it. So long as they tramp the streets, whose stones they lay, whose filth they clean, whose sewers they dig, yet upon which they must not stand too long lest the policeman bid them "move on"; as long as they go from factory to factory, begging for the opportunity to be a slave, receiving the insults of bosses and foremen, getting the old "no," the old shake of the head, in these factories they built, whose machines they wrought; so long as they consent to herd like cattle, in the cities, driven year after year, more and more, off the mortgaged land, the land they cleared, fertilized, cultivated, rendered of value; so long as they stand shivering, gazing thro' plate glass windows at overcoats, which they made, but cannot buy, starving in the midst of food they produced but cannot have; so long as they continue to do these things vaguely relying upon some power outside themselves, be it god, or priest, or politician, or employer, or charitable society, to remedy matters, so long deliverance will be delayed.