Helene D. Gayle Quotes

Private appropriation of the Earth’s surface, the natural resources, and the means of life is nothing less a crime than a crime against humanity, but the comparative few who are beneficiaries of this iniquitous social arrangement, far from being viewed as criminals meriting punishment, are the exalted rulers of society, and the people they exploit gladly render them homage and obeisance.

Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

The public domain has been squandered, our coal fields bartered away, our forests denuded, our people impoverished, and we are attempting to build a prosperous commonwealth among people who are being robbed of their homes.

Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.

If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.

I've always stood on one fact - that all over the world, there are only two things, the Establishment and the poor people. The poor people are a massive majority and across the world they are exploited in different kinds of ways. The Establishment depends on exploiting raw materials and the poor.

However badly off a community may be at any given time, someone profits while the community remains in its present conditions. Someone owes his status to retention of the present conditions. Someone's plans and investment in the future depend on everything remaining the same.

The white man expelled the Indian, took his possessions, developed the unexplored resources, and now he devotes a portion of his accumulations to establish institutions where the red man learn the secret and method of his power.

It’s dangerous to live among poor people, because if they don’t have income, they are coming for you.

We cannot rebuild the American Dream here at home by catering to the voices of the privileged and powerful.

Poor people are too stupid to know they're just chess pieces in a game.

Ecology's implications for capitalism are too momentous for the capitalist to contemplate. The plutocrats are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity. The present ecological crisis has been created by the few at the expense of the many.

I believe you should tell the story of injustices, of inequalities, of bad conditions, so that the people as a whole in this country really face the problems that people who are pushed to the point of striking know all about, but others know practically nothing about.

I recognize now that the conditions that Indians are living in are the conditions that poor people everywhere are living in.

The freedom that comes with globalization is freedom for the rich and powerful nations to further exploit and further marginalize those at the bottom of the social ladder.

If power is abstraction, which many black men, black women, and people of color have very little voice in, well, then I want to sit at the table.

The greatest discrimination in the world now is against poor people.

I'm persuaded that if most people saw what I see on a regular basis, they would want change.

There can be no peace as long as there is grinding poverty, social injustice, inequality, oppression, environmental degradation, and as long as the weak and small continue to be trodden by the mighty and powerful.

If I were a Brazilian without land or money or the means to feed my children, I would be burning the rain forest too.

Hear me people: We have now to deal with another race - small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.

A considerable proportion of the developed world's prosperity rests on paying the lowest possible prices for the poor countries' primary products and on exporting high-cost capital and finished goods to those countries. Continuation of this kind of prosperity requires continuation of the relative gap between developed and underdeveloped countries - it means keeping poor people poor. Increasingly, the impoverished masses are understanding that the prosperity of the developed countries and of the privileged minorities in their own countries is founded on their poverty.

Under neoliberalism, you have a political-financial class that doesn't care about whether people are suffering. They float above politics. They have power and they don't care. They'll do anything to simply increase their wealth.

In the current economic situation, the temptation for the more dynamic economies is that of chasing after advantageous alliances that, nevertheless, can have harmful effects for poorer states, prolonging situations of extreme mass poverty of men and women and using up the earth's natural resources, entrusted to man by God the Creator-as Genesis says-that he might cultivate and protect it.

I think we just have to look at all the ways in which we are violating the Earth, each other, economic violence, racial violence, environmental violence - where we are dominating and not cooperating .