David Satcher Quotes

Hurricane Katrina was a disaster. It exposed the soft underbelly of America when it comes to race and class.

Disparity is Australia's worst social problem. Thousands of lives are slowly being crushed, while billions are wasted on thousands of little initiatives trying to 'close the gap.'

I don't care about wealth. What seems to be upsetting is institutionalizing the advantages that wealth gives you.

America’s real majority is suffering a minority complex of neglect. They have become the real foes of Negro rights, foreign aid, etc, because … they feel forgotten, at the second table behind the tightly organized smaller groups at either end of the U. S. spectrum.

We only have to recall the color of the faces of those who were most devastated by Katrina, to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans.

The people who couldn't get out of New Orleans to escape the storm were predominantly Black.

We have to improve life, not just for those who have the most skills and those who know how to manipulate the system. But also for and with those who often have so much to give but never get the opportunity.

I think we've made tremendous progress on racism. We've even made progress on war. We've made almost no progress on poverty.

I'd like to think Helen very much understood what it was to be disadvantaged in the medical field. And that that was something that she never let dictate her choices.

If you repress rather than unlock the potential of large groups of Americans, what's that going to do to our economy? It's going to contract, not expand.

So long as the most vulnerable people in our population are consigned to places that the rest of us will always shun and flee and view with fear, I am afraid that educational denial, medical and economic devastation, and aesthetic degradation will be inevitable.

Especially some of the poorest in our society need to have the greatest support because health inequalities are too wide.

Social inequality kills. It unduly deprives individuals and communities experiencing social deprivation of their health, increases their burden of disease and disease, and cuts short their lives.

George W. Bush let people die on rooftops in New Orleans because they were black and poor.

In the last era of the [civil rights] movement, the disenfranchised were the blacks, the colored. Now the disenfranchised are the have-nots, the unemployed, the hungry.

Both class and race survive education, and neither should.

Those who are most desperate for change are those who are the most powerless to effect it.

In the developed world, income inequality within the country is the most important determinant of health standards and life expectancy.

In the final analysis, poverty is a condition of helplessness - of inability to cope with the conditions of existence in our complex society.

My father and his eight siblings grew up in the kind of poverty that Americans don't like to talk about unless a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina strikes, and then the conversation only lasts as long as the news cycle. His family squatted in shacks. The children scavenged for food.

When you don't have equality of opportunity because you don't have equal access to education, it just seems so outrageous. It weakens our economy and leads to more inequality.

Inequality is not so much a cause of economic, political, and social processes as a consequence. Some of these processes are good, some are bad, and some are very bad indeed.

I think drugs affect poor people and people of color more than anyone.

Until we address the pervasive structural and interpersonal threats facing communities of color, we will remain unequipped to make equity a reality.

Although globalization and technological change have disrupted traditional work arrangements, both processes have the potential to benefit everyone. The fact that they have not suggests that the wealthy have captured the benefits for themselves.