Michael Harrington 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.

I think that there always have been and always will be at least two Americas - the poor America, the second America, tends to be in the shadows. Sometimes it's an America of people in a ghetto of color, sometimes it's an economic ghetto, but definitely there is a parallel America which people in the dominant America prefer to ignore if they can.

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

A poor man is like a foreigner in his own country.

When you come from desperate poverty, and that's exactly what I come from, you know that nonsenses are not to be tolerated. I'm not sure who gains from chaos, but I know it's not the poor folks in the council flats. The politics of vindictiveness is never, ever anything like a solution.

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

Poverty is often off the beaten track. It always has been.

As you would expect when individualism is based only on opportunity, no one asks what happens to those who have neither the financial nor the political clout to exercise their tiny portion of that opportunity.

We will not settle for a state that will settle for an underclass.

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

The structure of apartheid is still rooted in the Haitian society. When you have apartheid, you don't see those behind the walls. That is the reality of Haiti.

What I quickly discovered is that our so-called new South Africa has as much material for a story-teller as the old one. The landscape hasn't really changed. Who is in power now is different to who was in power then, but the squatter camps grow like cancer, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

The Christian Democrats always made you feel like the poor relation.

I'm concerned about - the oppression of the poor.

Crime is a tax on the poor

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.

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.

It has been the purpose of the ruling class, apparently, to build new barriers between themselves and the common people, rather than tear away any of those already existing. I think no one can understand the actual condition of the mass of whites in Georgia and the Carolinas, except by some daily contact with them. The injustice done to three fourths of them was hardly less than that done to all the blacks.... Nine of every ten white men in South Carolina had almost as little to do with even State affairs as the negroes had.

… in the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat – or get eaten up

There is despair, Mr President, in the faces of those you do not see; in the places that you do not visit.

I come from the poor people, and I have been here working my whole stinkin' career for people who don't have a chance, and I really resent anybody that says I'm doing it for the rich. Give me a break.

Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.

Liberals have to get more comfortable with dealing with the poor as they actually are. I admire their refusal to look down on the least among us, but at some level, that can become an excuse to never really look at the problem at all.

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

The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible.