John Scofield Quotes

A common measure of poverty is how much money you have in relation to other people - that is useful as far as it goes, but that excludes the case of, say, a hunter in the rainforest who has no money but is not poor. And there can be a number of people with money but who can consider themselves unwanted or invisible or estranged from society.

I feel sympathy for the working class lad. I've always championed about ticket prices and try to equate that to people's salaries.

Poverty is the frontier we have to be able to cross.

We can't have Harlem become one borough for the rich.

But the good news is that out in the countryside, just about every place that's got a zip code has somebody or some group of people battling the economic and political exclusion that Wall Street and Washington are shoving down our throats.

The bad news in our most cosmopolitan and vibrant cities is that many middle-class people can no longer afford to live in 'middle-class' school districts.

In Paris, where I live, the inner neighborhoods are only available to the white elite. The poor and dispossessed are shuffled out to suburbs and never seen.

There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.

There are two Americas - separate, unequal, and no longer even acknowledging each other except on the barest cultural terms. In the one nation, new millionaires are minted every day. In the other, human beings no longer necessary to our economy, to our society, are being devalued and destroyed.

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.

If you people can’t afford to live in our town, then you’ll just have to leave.

I personally think that gentrification happens long before you start seeing white people in formerly people-of-color neighborhoods. It starts happening when we start telling the young, hard-working, quote-unquote 'smart' kids that they need to measure success by how far they get away from our communities.

The trouble with capitalism as a system is that only those who have or can get capital can make it work for them, and that leaves out damn near all of us.

I did not have a car in high school and neither did Angelina. Try to imagine. You go to Beverly Hills High, one of the wealthiest high schools in the nation. Even the cheapest car that anyone has is brand new. All my friends are well off. I have a movie-star father and no car. It was debilitating.

You have to be very poor and desperate, or very rich, or lucky, to live in Islington. We don't have the people in the middle, the people who serve the community.

Poverty is a result of lack of opportunity. Lack of opportunity is about being without power, without being in a position to make choices.

Everyone's seen poverty - well, most have.

When we were doing shows in the mid-'90s, the audiences were 95% black. What's happened now is the gentrification of hip-hop. A lot of cities passed ordinances that made it hard for black audiences to gather in large groups. Clubs are more open to hip-hop now 'cause it's the same crowd that goes to rock shows.

Just as the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say 'thou shalt not' to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?

What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can't afford to buy a hamburger?

Its all big money, high rent, high prices in New York City now. The poor people completely got rolled over. I've never seen anything like it in my life. It's disgusting.

Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.

If the global economy is unresponsive to people who feel left behind, if inequality continues to grow, then we could end up seeing more and more of these divisions arise throughout advanced economies around the world.

The world is full of smart, poor people.

How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion.