George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Yes, Manila had its slums; one saw them on the drive from the airport: vast districts of men in dirty white undershirts lounging idly in front of auto-repair shops - like a poorer version of the 1950s America depicted in such films as Grease.

I was in Vancouver, and I was in what I was told was the poorest neighborhood in North America - which I find very hard to believe because has anyone here ever been to Detroit?

In India, the poverty is so vast that the state cannot control it. It can beat people, but it can't prevent the poor from flooding the roads, the cities, the parks and railway station platforms.

I can't be calm when I drive through sections of Atlanta that look more like Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, than America.

The migration of the black middle class out of the cities in the wake of the civil rights movement and the deindustrialization of urban economies has left a corroded core, cut off from the social; mainstream and reliant on inadequate federal support.

Kids from poor families might be nicer, the might be happier, they might be more polite---but in countless ways, the manner in which they are raised puts them at a disadvantage in the measures that count in contemporary American society.

It is not squalid people who produce the squalid housing; it is the squalid housing that makes squalid people.

Southwest Detroit has been through hell (excuse my directness) with Matty Moroun, his Bridge Company, and all his fancy-named subsidiaries. From blighted homes that my boys have to walk by to allowing his trucks to rumble down our residential streets, passing our parks, schools, and homes - we have had it.

Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday's and today's school dropouts are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did.

I'm not sticking up for white kids - I'm going to have a barrage of hate mail - but it's true. If you're poor, you're really poor.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Our inner cities are a disaster. You get shot walking to the store. They have no education. They have no jobs. I will do more for African-Americans and Latinos than Hillary Clinton can ever do in 10 lifetimes.

African-Americans now 45 percent poverty in the inner cities. The education is a disaster. Jobs are essentially nonexistent.

The civil rights movement didn't deal with the issue of political disenfranchisement in the Northern cities. It didn't deal with the issues that were happening in places like Detroit, where there was a deep process of deindustrialization going on.

There are certain neighborhoods in America like that - like in Pittsburgh, where I'm from - where people wouldn't think it's even livable for human beings. Those are the areas that I connect with because I come from places like that, and I just think it's interesting how the rest of the world acts like it doesn't exist. But a lot of the best things come from there.

We're also going to fix our inner cities. Forty-five percent of African-American children are - under the age six - are living in poverty.

Hillary Clinton's been talking about the inner cities for 25 years. Nothing's going to ever happen.

The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.

The way in which the vast mass of the poor are treated by modern society is truly scandalous. They are herded into great cities where they breathe a fouler air than in the countryside which they have left.

We have to help African American people that, for the most part, are stuck there, Hispanic American people. We have Hispanic-American people that are in the inner cities and they are living in hell.

I was out there for 12 days. There are more beggars in Soho than there are in Kabul.

On a cold and gray Chicago morning another little baby child is born in the ghetto, and his Mama cries.

Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound, or smell of it

So long as the great majority of the poor in any country are inert and are laboring without any hope in this world, the whole associated life of that community rests on an equivocal foundation. Its moral and social order is tied to an economic system which starves and mutilates the great majority of the population, and under such conditions its religion necessarily becomes a spiritual drug, administered for the purpose of subduing the popular discontent and relieving the popular misery.

The ones that actually affect people who don't have enough money to change them - which is almost everybody. But that has nothing to do with the president.