Marco Rubio 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 is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

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.

To deal with radicalism and extremism, we need to deal with economic inequality. This is what I learned from my experience in Solo and then in Jakarta.

Problems of persistent poverty cannot be addressed unless they are acknowledged.

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

The Reagan program is not working because the program is not fair - and, just as important, because the people themselves know it is not fair.

If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources. We lack something else.

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.

Global poverty is the product of reversible policy failures overseen by politicians, past and present. The poorest of the poor don't vote in American or European elections. They don't make donations to political parties or hire lobbyists in D.C., London or Canberra.

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

I think we're living in a world where society is very difficult.

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.

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.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

'Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream' is an intentionally angry film. How could it not be when the chance of an infant dying is five times greater on the Bronx Park Avenue than on Manhattan's Park Avenue just across the Harlem River?

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

I think one of the biggest mistakes that America has made - and maybe the world because this is, sort of, the core of communism and socialism - is that you can have perfect solutions to social problems like poverty, like crime. You're not going to eliminate all crime. Maybe you'll never eliminate all poverty.

Bill Cosby is a famous black guy who has a bully pulpit the size of the world; it's global. He puts his colossal foot on the vulnerable necks of poor people, and as a result of that, we don't have a balanced conversation.

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.

The economy is not governed with the bottom half in mind.

There are people in whole parts of our cities who are being totally left behind and disregarded. They are unheard. They are told they are unneeded by this economy. And that extreme poverty breeds conditions for extreme violence.

We think of violence as being conflict and fighting and wars and so forth, but the most ongoing horrific measure of violence is in the horrible poverty of the Third World... and the poverty in the United States as well.

For as long as our people are held hostage by controllable socio-economic forces, we cannot afford to be indifferent to the ravages of poverty in all its dimensions and ramifications.

It's important for that to exist in a society that doesn't present you with any genuine problems.