Otis Moss III Quotes

It's important for us to fight for certain changes that need to happen. And one of those issues that I really care about is education. But also another one is incarceration.

The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can't black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework?

Child labor perpetuates poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, population growth, and other social problems.

Parallel to our vast strides in technology, there is a dangerous rise in unemployment, foreclosures, and degrading education. Millions of people are stricken with hopelessness and strife. Sadly, in the name of progress we have polluted the air, water, soil and the food we eat.

The problem in a lot of low-income countries is that people take out loans to go and get degrees, which are then irrelevant in the job market.

Around 80% of Liberians are unemployed and only half of all children go to primary school. Just one in 20 go on to secondary school. Young children are on the streets instead of in the classrooms. We are not giving them the opportunity to learn and they will struggle to get jobs when they grow up.

You’ve got to stop beating up your women because you can’t find a job because you didn’t want to get an education and now you’re [earning] minimum wage.

Sihanouk developed an education system very well, and that was in some ways its undoing, because there was education where they produced a lot of graduates, but there was no service industry to absorb these graduates. So you had a lot of graduates pulling rickshaws to carry passengers. That development led to a huge unrest among youth.

The institution of marriage is not under attack as a result of the President’s words. Marriage was under attack years ago by men who viewed women as property and children as trophies of sexual prowess. Marriage is under attack by low wages, high incarceration, unfair tax policy, unemployment, and lack of education. Marriage is under attack by clergy who proclaim monogamy yet think nothing of stepping outside the bonds of marriage to have multiple affairs with “preaching groupies.” Same-gender couples did not cause the high divorce rate, but our adolescent views of relationships and our inability as a community to come to grips with the ethic of love and commitment did. We still confuse sex with love and romance with commitment.

It's no coincidence that the cities with the highest rates of violence also have the highest rates of unemployment. There are not many opportunities. We have to address that, starting from the government down and the grassroots up.

American men do have genuine reasons for anxiety. The traditional jobs that many men have filled are disappearing, thanks to automation and outsourcing. The jobs that remain require, in most cases, higher education, which is increasingly difficult for non-affluent families to afford.

Eighty-two percent of prisoners in the United States are high-school dropouts. A high-school dropout between the ages of 30 and 34 is two-thirds more likely to be in jail, or to have been in jail, or to be dead.

When you have kids that have no jobs and are not in school, too often they get themselves into trouble. So what we have got to do is invest in education and in jobs, something which I have fought for, rather than more jails and incarceration.

I can't go to school, cause I don't have a gun. I ain't got a gun, cause I ain't got a job. I ain't got a job, cause I can't go to school.

There are few greater dangers to political stability than the existence of an intellectual proletariat who find no outlet for their learning.

Most of us think prison is a place where bad people go - which is what I thought for a long time - until you really start to look inside the system and you see, this is not right.

If a 25-year old can't read and write and he or she isn't gaining marketable skills, it doesn't matter if a Republican or a Democrat is in the White House. His or her future will be bleak.

I've never been very fully employed either but just think of what it's like, you know, to go home with a mortgage payment you know and kids and everything else. My dad had that happen to him in the early '30s.

How foolish it is to run away with a man who's already run away with someone else.

The proper basis for marriage is mutual misunderstanding. The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married. One should always be in love - that's the reason one should never marry.

We know that they cannot bear their share of the taxes to help pay for their education. And unless those children get a good education we know that they become dropouts and they become delinquents and they become taxeaters instead of taxpayers. We know that they will join the unemployed. That is why we put top priority on breaking the vicious cycle that today threatens the future of 5 million children in this great land of opportunity which we talk about so much.

A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours.

Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.

Let Girls Learn issue has always been personal for me. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago where most folks, including my parents, didn't have college degrees. But with a lot of hard work - and a lot of financial aid - I had the chance to attend Princeton and Harvard Law School, and that gave me the confidence to pursue my ambitions.

More money is put into prisons than into schools. That, in itself, is the description of a nation bent on suicide. I mean, what is more precious to us than our own children? We are going to build a lot more prisons if we do not deal with the schools and their inequalities.