Jesse Jackson Quotes

There are people in whole parts of our cities who are being totally left behind and disregarded. They are unheard. They are told they are unneeded by this economy. And that extreme poverty breeds conditions for extreme violence.

Poor children fare worse than rich children on just about everything that social scientists measure.

To me poverty, mental health, and addictions don't sound like criminal justice problems. They sound to me like a social justice problem.

When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one - it's the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky - in the big cities, too, for that matter.

Criminality is always the result of poverty. Countries that experience such a fundamental change as we have - we had the apartheid regime and must now develop a multicultural democracy - must necessarily pass through a phase of high crime rates.

It was a slow understanding that my kidnappers really are a product of their environment.

A lot of positive psychology is stuck in being the psychology of privilege, and I reject that.

Growing up I always felt like I was living on the other side of the tracks. I knew the people on the other side had more resources, more money, happier families.

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.

True as this is, it is also true that for one who won through there were many who gained nothing, and it was, and is, the sheer weight of numbers of those who failed of this that has made their influence on the modern life as pervasive and controlling as it is.

Hunger is almost like something the West does. It's almost like the direct result of the way the West performs.

We have to improve life, not just for those who have the most skills and those who know how to manipulate the system. But also for and with those who often have so much to give but never get the opportunity.

You have little representation of young black men in the business sector, so you have children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods who don't hear discussions at the dinner table about what goes on in business. It's almost as if we have two nations.

The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof.

Offhand, the only North American writers I can think of who have come from a background of rural poverty and gone on to write about it have been Negroes.

I gained direct knowledge of the life of the poor in big towns: I have lived the narrowing mechanism of its conditioning and feared it.

This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.

That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.

Those who suffer are not those at the top, but are the less privileged members of society.

Crime is a tax on the poor

Just because you are poor and have no voice does not mean that you don’t deserve police protection.

Those who are privileged have little regard for history.

For the urban poor the police are those that arrest you. In almost any slum there is a vast conspiracy against the forces of law and order.

A culture that generates more backwardness with every generation.

I see myself working in the tradition of sociology and journalism that tries to bear witness to poverty.