Tip O'Neill Quotes

Obviously, I have certain policy positions that I push and advocate for that would benefit people dealing in a system that breeds inequality and makes life more difficult for people.

There are people getting screwed in our country every single second, minute, hour of the day. And if by our work, we can decrease that number, we'll make a difference; we'll be doing our jobs.

Year after year, politicians have drafted huge piles of legislation on the assumption that most people are not good. And we know the consequences of that policy: inequality, loneliness and mistrust.

Nobody is poor unless he stand in need of justice.

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

The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them.

George W. Bush has helped those who have most, hurt those who have least and ignored everyone in between.

There are many things in life that are not fair …. I don’t believe that the Federal Government should take action to try to make these opportunities exactly equal.

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

There are forms of oppression and domination which become invisible - the new normal.

No man-made system is perfect, and the system of oppression is no exception. It is subject to fatigue, to cracks, which you are the likelier to discover the longer your term.

I've always believed there are inequities in our country.

I think what we forget is that everybody loses when we keep unnecessary privilege. The cost to society overall is much greater.

After years of globalisation, disaffected populations have lost confidence that the system is fair.

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.

I just think the most difficult thing to displace is privilege.

We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of 'choice' and a denial of reality - a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, and a growing machinery of social and civil death.

If the market is left to sort matters out, social injustice will be heightened and suffering in the community will grow with the neglect the market fosters.

So much has happened to obscure the dialogue about race and about gender and discrimination in general, especially where those things touch on economics.

What people don't know about oppression is that the oppressor works much harder. You always grew up being told you were not smart enough or not fast enough, but we all lived from the time we were children to beat the system.

It would be a tragic mistake for us out here to imagine that Bush represents the hearts and the minds of the majority of your countrymen. Many of your black and other compatriots must be just as anguished as we are.

Let's leave beside them in another pile all the injustices which exist in the northern state.

I don't think we live in a particularly equal society.

Things do go wrong. Not everyone benefits from the capitalist dream.

We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.