Eamon de Valera Quotes

Broken Britain isn't just about our indebted economy, it's also about our broken society and broken politics too.

The jobs crisis has reached a boiling point, which is why we see Occupy Wall Street protestors crying out for an America that lets all of us reach for the American Dream again - a dream that says if you work hard and play by the rules, you can have a good life and retire with dignity.

He is now rising from affluence to poverty.

Have you heard a single national figure tell you all of the crises of the recent past are not economic, they're cultural?

We oppose the benefit cap. We oppose social cleansing. We will bring the welfare bill down by controlling rents and boosting wages, not by impoverishing families and socially cleansing our communities.

The second truism that we must understand is that poverty does not create our social problems, our social problems create our poverty.

I think isolation is one of the greatest problems, an ever-growing obstacle to political solidarity.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

One of the things I learned is that you've got to deal with the underlying social problems if you want to have an impact on crime - that it's not a coincidence that you see the greatest amount of violent crime where you see the greatest amount of social dysfunction.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.

'Up in the Air' may be a glossy production sprinkled with laughter and sex, but it captures the distinctive topography of our Great Recession as vividly as a far more dour Hollywood product of 70 years ago, 'The Grapes of Wrath,' did the vastly different landscape of the Great Depression.

When people lack jobs, opportunity, and ownership of property they have little or no stake in their communities.

What's dangerous is the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few individuals.

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, 'What are we going to do?' but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that's nothing.

Throughout evolution, ostracism was death indeed.

Inequality causes problems by creating fissures in societies, leaving those at the bottom feeling marginalized or disenfranchised.

Governments everywhere that are unable to guarantee equitable growth and social welfare have suffered a fatal decay of legitimacy.

Blacks' problems lie not in the heads of white people but rather in the wasted and incompletely fulfilled lives of too many black people.

Global poverty is a powder keg ignitable by our own indifference.

Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets ... the rich and the poor.

Poverty causes crime.

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it. So long as they tramp the streets, whose stones they lay, whose filth they clean, whose sewers they dig, yet upon which they must not stand too long lest the policeman bid them "move on"; as long as they go from factory to factory, begging for the opportunity to be a slave, receiving the insults of bosses and foremen, getting the old "no," the old shake of the head, in these factories they built, whose machines they wrought; so long as they consent to herd like cattle, in the cities, driven year after year, more and more, off the mortgaged land, the land they cleared, fertilized, cultivated, rendered of value; so long as they stand shivering, gazing thro' plate glass windows at overcoats, which they made, but cannot buy, starving in the midst of food they produced but cannot have; so long as they continue to do these things vaguely relying upon some power outside themselves, be it god, or priest, or politician, or employer, or charitable society, to remedy matters, so long deliverance will be delayed.

From a planning perspective, economic degradation begets environmental degradation, which begets social degradation.

My own view is that left-wing positions largely come about from resentment - I agree with Nietzsche about this - a resentment about the surrounding social order. They have privileges, I don't. Or, I have them and I can't live up to them.