Sam Richardson Quotes

I was in the heart and soul of Baltimore. I definitely felt a connection to the people. They're really hard-working people that want to have a better life. And I saw the struggle that exists there.

In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

In Rio, 1.4 million of the 6.3 million people live in favelas, or slums. They are all over the city, but favelas are not always a problem - sometimes they can be a solution, if you have the right public policies.

The slums are not a place of despair. Its inhabitants are all working towards a better life.

Projects meant living with blacks and Puerto Ricans, but that's what we wanted. Living in the projects, we've met so many wonderful, wonderful people.

We have to take real steps to break down the culture of benefit dependency and failure which blights too many urban areas.

How does one endure in a place they shouldn't be condemned to live in? You could take that same question and apply it to any number of neighborhoods in any number of cities.

Curitiba is not a paradise. We have all the problems that most Latin American cities have. We have slums. We have the same difficulties, but the big difference is the respect given by people due to the quality of the services which are provided.

What's popular in places considered ghettos - whether that's the inner city or Appalachia - is having a decent quality of life.

I gained direct knowledge of the life of the poor in big towns: I have lived the narrowing mechanism of its conditioning and feared it.

Growing up in New Orleans and just being in a poverty-stricken neighborhood gave me that same fire that Eazy had to separate himself from what could have ended up being such a bad situation.

When I get out across the country and listen to people, the resentment that I see and the frustration that I see is that we have a generation of people who are fairly convinced that their kids are not going to have a better quality of life or a better future than they will.

If you read the 'Daily Mail,' you would imagine that the British middle classes lead lives of unremitting misery.

If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons. They've come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That's why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.

It's important for me to go back into the ghetto, where I'm from. I still get my oxygen from there. I don't live in the ghetto anymore, but every time I go back, I'm still seeing the same things that I lived.

I’d rather be a lamppost in Harlem than the mayor of any town in Georgia.

Poor children fare worse than rich children on just about everything that social scientists measure.

The freedom of the city is the freedom of expression and the freedom of the mind. So precious is this freedom that the citizens judge the city's squalor for its promise .... It is in the nature of great cities to be dangerous, just as it is in the nature of the future to be dangerous.

If crime went down 100 percent it would still be 50 percent higher than it should be.

The more you improve the condition of these people, the more you cultivate their minds, the more miserable you make them in their present state.

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, so there was always a sense of struggle, but we had hope.

Poverty is not just about income: it's about aspiration. It's not just about giving people a couple of extra pounds a week, welcome though that is.

I didn't have to leave my neighborhood to be surrounded by the things that 'Super Fly' is about. It was easier than most scripts because it was about an environment that I knew.

Prior to Katrina, the South Bronx and New Orleans' Ninth Ward had a lot in common. Both were largely populated by poor people of color, both hotbeds of cultural innovation: think hip-hop and jazz. Both are waterfront communities that host both industries and residents in close proximity of one another.