David Graeber Quotes

The ones that actually affect people who don't have enough money to change them - which is almost everybody. But that has nothing to do with the president.

I think that so many people don't understand how easy it is to be broke, how easy it is to find yourself in a situation where you're in an absolutely foreign place.

You and I can be busy, and we take a vacation from work. You can't take a break from being poor. You can't say, 'Hey I've had enough of worrying about money, I'm just going to be rich for a couple of weeks until I've recovered.'

Poverty affects people of all races.

Frankly that's what makes such a big difference between President Obama on one hand and Mitt Romney on the other. Gov. Romney has not walked in those shoes of the ordinary Americans and frankly I don't think he has the capacity to quite understand the struggle that the 98 percent of Americans go through every single day.

Families rely on financial services more than ever, but those who need them most - who struggle to make ends meet - too often must contend with sky-high interest rates and tricks and traps buried in the fine print of their loan products.

It's heartbreaking to see so many people trapped in a web of enforced idleness, deep debt, and gnawing self-doubt.

nothing more afflicts the mind of man than Poverty

We need to truly understand what economic injustice and inequality looks like for hard-working Canadians grappling with it every day on the ground, at home and at work.

In America, the 1 percent and the 10 percent are doing just fine, but the people who are bearing the brunt of this economy are the ones who suffer.

Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.

In America, we are living in a country where the deep economic problems have not been solved and arguably, in many cases, haven't been addressed.

Complaint is poverty.

Middle income families with children are Australia’s new poor

The struggle of ordinary people for a decent living, for security, is as old as the republic, but it's taken on a new and urgent edge. Instead of shared prosperity our political system has now produced a winner-take-all economy.

I think what you've got are millions of people who are in trouble today. They really are. They're confused. They're working longer hours for lower wages. They're seeing productivity going up but their kids are worse off economically than they are. They're looking at a campaign finance system in politics and they see corruption, big money buying elections. Nobody in Congress is listening to them.

I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty - they are not out on the street; they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata.

In the richest country in the history of the world, this Obama economy has crushed the middle class. Family income has fallen by $4,000, but health insurance premiums are higher, food prices are higher, utility bills are higher, and gasoline prices have doubled. Today more Americans wake up in poverty than ever before.

Poverty of course is no disgrace, but it is damned annoying.

Footage of people camped out at Best Buy or elsewhere is not remotely a celebration. Rather, it's a reminder of just how economically distressed a large percentage of our populace is.

There is nothing worse than being ashamed of parsimony or poverty.

Americans are falling out of the middle class, not into it. And they deserve relief. I absolute support extending the Bush tax cuts for those who work the hardest and invest the most in our economy - the real drivers of American growth, the middle class.

There's not much money in Tallahassee. Not many people can leave Tallahassee because they don't have the means.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

So people have been hurting and I understand that. And it doesn't give them comfort or solace for me to tell them, you know, but for me, we would be in a worldwide depression.