Lucinda Williams Quotes

I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

To be honest, busking was a massive part of becoming aware of homelessness. I used to run into a lot of 'Big Issue' sellers and a lot of people on the street. It really opened my eyes to the kind of life that they live and the options that are open for them - or not, actually.

Poverty is rooted in injustice.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

Poor men's reasons are not heard.

What too few people mention when discussing crime is the degree to which concentrated poverty, hopelessness and despair are the chambermaids of violence and incivility.

Give the peasants neither life nor death.

There are more than 200,000 people in Maputo who are nothing more than parasites.

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.

There are no "points of light" for those who sleep on grates and park benches.

It is assumed that the daughters of the poor are for the use of the rich. They assume that we’re their property.

Disenfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white.

What the poor did to the poor was the business of the poor, not the business of the proper people who ran the city.

There are at this day in Scotland two hundred thousand people begging from door to door. These are not only no way advantageous, but a very grievous burden to so poor a country … It were better for the nation if they were sold to the galleys or West Indies, than that they should continue any longer to be a burden and curse upon us.

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slaver's scars, I am the Red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek— And finding only the same ole stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

Underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions.

The questions that consume me, that keep me up at night, are the people that are sleeping on the streets.

It's a mistake to think that there's a difference between someone on the street and someone not on the street.

The familiar mood that awaits the sensitive young who are poor and dispossessed is a mood of sharp and painful inferiority, of violently angry tensions, of desperate and overwhelming longings.

The rich stick together; the poor and the marginalised are thrown together.

I was able to do The Saint of Fort Washington, on the relationship between two homeless men.

In a change of masters the poor change nothing except their master's name.