Austin Mitchell Quotes

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.

The problem is not just affirmative action, though. The problem is poor people, working people and their children, and affirmative action for the most part doesn't even apply to them.

You know, some people got no choice, and they can never find a voice, to talk with that they can even call their own. So the first thing that they see, that allows them the right to be, why they follow it, you know, it's called bad luck.

We pride ourselves on our democratic traditions, but in Canada, women couldn't vote until 1918, Asians until 1948, and First Nations people living on reserves until 1960.

If you are a representative, and poor people don’t vote, you’re not going to pay particular attention to the needs of the poor.

If you have more rich people and more poor people and fewer people in the middle, what you lose is democracy.

One-fourth of the children in this country are poor—and they don't vote.

If people of colour do not exercise their democratic right to vote, they will remain an invisible, voiceless, and largely ignored part of the electorate.

Once any group in society stands in a relatively deprived position in relation to other groups, it is genuinely deprived.

Economic growth is the key to everything. But once you have economic growth, it is important that we reach out to people who live in the shadows, the people who don't seem to ever think that they get a fair deal. And that includes people in our minority community; that includes people who feel as though they don't have a chance to move up.

It's the people without the money and the power, who desperately want to live, for those people small things aren't small at all.

The people that are the invisible ones, the marginalized, the quote-unquote weirdos, the people that get things thrown at them, the people that get harassed every day just for existing . . . I just still strongly align with them.

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

We live in a world with serious class complexes. It is one thing to be a college student with loan debts and another thing to be just dirt poor for your entire life. The challenge is to come up with more complex understandings of where we are, more global awareness of what connects Americans with what is happening with suffering and oppressed people all around the world.

The very idea that there should be a certain class of people who give orders by virtue of their ownership of wealth and another huge class who take on orders and follow them because of their lack of access to wealth and power, that's unacceptable. So, sure it should be abolished.

Today it is fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately, it is not fashionable to talk with them.

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.

...poor people are just as human as anyone else. They have just as much potential as anyone.

Remember the people in the back streets of Derby.

As long as there's anybody that's poor or middle class, there will not be satisfaction that there are rich people. Not 'til we get rid of all the rich can we say we have finished the job.

When I was asked: "Will shame do it?" Meaning: Will welfare people be shamed into getting respectable work? And I said that shame plays the biggest role there is: The biggest shame is that there is so much abundance around but that so many have so little and so few have so much. That's the shame.

Those in the margins are always trying to get to the center, and those at the center, frequently in the name of tradition, are trying to keep the margins at a distance.

Because Ajamu Baraka speaks in the language of his community, and makes no bones about it, he really invites in a whole new demographic of voters who have been locked out? - African-American and black and brown people and indigenous people? - who have felt like this system has no place for them. And he is unapologetic about standing up for the rights of the oppressed people and against colonialism and against imperialism.

Us as a people, we can't do it on our own. We have to understand that we're not each other's enemy. We have to stop discriminating against each other due to class and due to race and due to location or financial position.

I don't know what's going to happen. But I will say this, you're going to have a lot of very unhappy people. And I think, frankly, for the Republicans to disenfranchise all those people, because if that happens, they're not voting and the Republicans lose.