Malcolm Fraser Quotes

It's not enough to tackle just the symptoms of poverty. You have to tackle the causes of poverty.

It's hard being black. You ever been black? I was black once - when I was poor.

I want to fight poverty and ignorance and give opportunity to those people who are locked out.

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

For the better part of two centuries, outsiders have been offering explanations that range from racist to learned-sounding - the supposed inferiority of blacks, the heritage of slavery, overpopulation - for why Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

The fact that policies often fail for no good reason is annoying but less depressing than the view that it is a big conspiracy against the poor… Name your favorite enemy… capitalism, corruption … Our view is easier. You think hard about the problems and you can solve them.

You can't wish away poverty overnight.

I don't want to sound Pollyannish about this. I understand that poverty is never just poverty. It's often this collection of maladies, this compounded adversity. I'm not naive about the problem. But I think that stable, steady housing is one of the surest footholds we could have on the road to financial stability.

There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.

We're willing to spend countless dollars putting people who need help in cages, and then when they get out we say you can't have a job, and you can't have housing, and because you don't have either, we're going to take your kids, too.

With sad, depressing predictability, the children of today's underclass become tomorrow's criminals and dropouts.

I know we haven't cleaned up all the slums, but I didn't create the slums, did I?

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

There never can be equality of rewards or possessions so long as the human plan contains varied talents and differing degrees of industry and thrift, but ours ought to be a country free from the great blotches of distressed poverty.

It has been the purpose of the ruling class, apparently, to build new barriers between themselves and the common people, rather than tear away any of those already existing. I think no one can understand the actual condition of the mass of whites in Georgia and the Carolinas, except by some daily contact with them. The injustice done to three fourths of them was hardly less than that done to all the blacks.... Nine of every ten white men in South Carolina had almost as little to do with even State affairs as the negroes had.

Poverty, discrimination and ignorance decrease growth.

The wiping out of crime is so largely an economic question because much crime arises from the fact that children grow up in undesirable surroundings and have parents that have been conditioned by the same type of environment.

Just as incarceration has come to define the lives of low-income black men, eviction is defining the lives of low-income black women.

And if you want to make many of our black leaders angry, just tell them that racism is not the number problem that black Americans face.

I can't eradicate poverty, but at least for the people around me, I can help make sure no child is denied a dream.

In my family and in my community, I see people struggling with drug addiction, with poverty and the effects of generational poverty; I see people struggling with lack of access to healthcare.

Poverty is about people lacking the tools they need to get on in life. And solving it is about tackling educational failure, antisocial behaviour, debt problems and addiction, and of course it's about work.

If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.

You know there's problems - you can see all the poverty and so on - but it's quite another matter to know what you can do about it.

The humanitarian aid system is built on a concept that when disaster strikes, outside agencies provide a temporary helping hand until people can take back control of their own lives. But across the world, we see millions of people caught in semi-permanent crises. As each year goes by, they are less and less likely to break free.