Abraham Polonsky Quotes

The Five Points was the toughest street corner in the world. That's how it was known. In fact, Charles Dickens visited it in the 1850s and he said it was worse than anything he'd seen in the East End of London.

America stands as a beacon of hope and the possibility of a better life - but it is also a nation where nearly 1 in 4 children live in poverty.

I understand that Detroit was a pretty rough place to grow up in the '70s and '80s.

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

You grow up in America and you're told from day one, 'This is the land of opportunity.' That everybody has an equal chance to make it in this country. And then you look at places like Harlem, and you say, 'That is absolutely a lie.'

The problem isn't that people don't understand how good things are. It's that they know, from personal experience, that things really aren't that good.

I spend a fair bit of time in Los Angeles, and there is much I love about the place - the weather, the food, the beaches and the golf. And a few things I don't. Like the way an enormous number of mentally ill people seem to be forced to live on the streets with little or nothing in the way of government assistance.

For many, the American dream has become a nightmare.

Some people see Baltimore as a hopeless place. Some have even made a lot of money on it.

When people grow up in atmospheres of violence or atmospheres of poverty, they don't normally use hi-falutin' language to describe those things. They would describe some brutal event the same way we would describe getting a taxi or missing the bus.

My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a very poor family. From Sicilian origin, I was the first person in my family to complete high school, let alone go to college.

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

I hope we can get back to what I call the kitchen table. Everyday issues that people are really worried about and focused on.

If I were to live in Africa, serving the poor, the number-one thing I'd miss wouldn't be running water or electricity - it would be style... being able to get dressed up and feel beautiful.

What I find curious is that I ever became a writer at all. I grew up in the South Bronx, the land of poverty and petty hoodlums.

We are an impoverished society. It is a poor society indeed that can’t pay for … amenities; that has no money for anything except expressways to rush people out of our dull and deteriorating cities

We have never enjoyed a piece of the great American dream.

There was more violent crime among poor Irish immigrants in New York City 100 years ago than there is among blacks and Puerto Ricans today.

In an increasingly complex world, we have a simple and bold vision that all children should have the opportunity to grow up healthy.

O'Casey was writing about people in the streets and his mother and dying babies and poverty. So that astounded me because I thought you could only write about English matters.

Detroit can't come close to repairing the decades of neglect without addressing the crisis in our neighborhoods. I live in southwest Detroit near Woodmere Cemetery. My neighbors and I deal with the negative impacts of job loss, increased poverty, and pollution every day.

I'm from Gary, Indiana, and everybody's damn near at the poverty level. It's a rough city to grow up in, and it's a modern-day ghost town.

Schools alone are not to blame for underachievement. The breakdown of the family, poverty, and decaying cities with eroding tax bases have made a good public school education nearly impossible in many parts of the country.

I am acting in a film based on Abheek Barua's 'City of Death.' It is a dark story that sifts through many layers of Kolkata.

If I were to say that I grew up in East Los Angeles in the projects, poor, I assumed that everybody understood that it came with its own reasons for being the way I am. I didn't get that people needed to understand where my comedy came from; I thought that they knew that.