Bill McKibben Quotes

There are more than 200,000 people in Maputo who are nothing more than parasites.

It’s scandalous when one thinks about the people who live in a world in which they need not be hungry, in which they need not die without medical care, in which they need not be illiterate, they need not feel hopeless and miserable so much of the time, and yet they are.

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

One thing that you consistently see everywhere is that the poor and the under-represented are always the ones who are going to suffer the most and get the short end of the stick.

When I stepped into this world, I saw that we were all burdened by a certain kind of indifference to the plight of poor people. We were burdened by an insensitivity to a legacy of racial bias. We were tolerating unfairness and unreliability in a way that burdened me and provoked me.

I choose the poverty of our poor people. But I am grateful to receive it (the Nobel) in the name of the hungry, the naked, the homeless, of the crippled, of the blind, of the lepers, of all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone.

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down, Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town.

Niggerization is the result of oppression -- and it doesn't just apply to the black people. Old people, poor people, and students can also get niggerized.

Disparity is Australia's worst social problem. Thousands of lives are slowly being crushed, while billions are wasted on thousands of little initiatives trying to 'close the gap.'

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

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.

I'd become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what color they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake.

Life is now a war zone, and as such, the number of people considered disposable has grown exponentially, and this includes low income whites, poor minorities, immigrants, the unemployed, the homeless, and a range of people who are viewed as a liability to capital and its endless predatory quest for power and profits.

In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless.

The people who couldn't get out of New Orleans to escape the storm were predominantly Black.

The poor prey on one another because their lives offer no hope and communicate the tragic message to these human beings that they have no possibility to attain a decent standard of living.

The structure of apartheid is still rooted in the Haitian society. When you have apartheid, you don't see those behind the walls. That is the reality of Haiti.

It's the rich you can terrorize. The poor have nothing to lose.

At the same, we need to remain sensitive to the reality that we are still an African society in which the majority of the people and communities live under severe deprivations and afflictions that are no fault of theirs.

If we continue to create a world where there is poverty and disrespect, there will continue to be terrorism.

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.

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

Human rights are not only violated by terrorism, repression or assassination, but also by unfair economic structures that creates huge inequalities.

Unless you've been touched personally, it's difficult to see, but there are millions of people who have no voice whatsoever.

With all the other -isms that we deal with, that sort of nameless -ism that we have in too many of our hearts against the poor in this country is what wounds us most broadly.