Robert J. Shiller Quotes

My first job, which I had to take when not more than fifteen, was assistant to a fruit peddler. It seemed all right to me until a little girl told me snootily, 'We never deal with peddler!' Thereupon I resigned, ashamed of what I was doing.

Too many Mainers are dependent on government handouts. Government dependency has not - and never will - create prosperity.

Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.

In all of my books, I really want to work with working-class people. My goal is to show the moments of grace and dignity in their lives.

The answers to feeding hungry children is not fewer dollars to feed hungry children, it's to do more. It is to raise the minimum wage. It is to increase, not dismantle, the earned income tax credit. It is to make college more affordable for more middle class families, not more expensive. These are the things that grow our middle class.

Almsgiving tends to perpetuate poverty; and does away with it once and for all. Almsgiving leaves a man just where he was before. Aid restores him to society as an individual worthy of all respect and not as a man with a grievance. Almsgiving is the generosity of the rich; social aid levels up social inequalities.

We were always a middle-class family who took pride in our little set-up.

I grew up in the middle class.

I still belong to a middle class family; middle class is a mindset than your financial status.

The able bodied poor don't want or need charity.... All they need is financial capital.

No nation respects a beggar.

The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty, that which we lack and strive to obtain is the instrument of slavery.

Most poor people I know are proud and really want not a handout but a hand up. They do have an inherent pride and dignity, and we should treat them as those who have fallen on bad days.

My people are poor and I am one of them.

Money is a great dignifier.

Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor.

We don't use the term 'working class' here because it's a taboo term. You're supposed to say 'middle class,' because it helps diminish the understanding that there's a class war going on.

That's a huge fear for middle-class women. It's not so much a fear for poor women, because poor women have always assumed that they are going to have to support themselves. It's middle-class women who have this fantasy that somebody else is going to support them.

The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and have a well-developed sense of independence.

Money is really only important if you don't have any.

Money is a topic that touches all races, all religions, all sexes, all ages, all tax brackets. It's a universal language that truly has been held up to us in society as a thing that determines whether we are successful, worthy, whether we have contributed something to life or not.

Oh, poverty parts good company.

The worst thing about poverty is not the actual living of it, but the shame of it.

In the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman dresses below herself from caprice.

I was teasing my brother that he was penniless, homeless, jobless. Right now in his life, racism isn't the central highlighting force: it's the world of work and economics. It doesn't mean that he isn't influenced by racism, but when he wakes up in the morning the thing that's driving his world is really issues of class, economics and power as they articulate themselves.