Hermann Hesse Quotes

A mortgaged home, an empty stomach and a ragged back know no party. We will live to write the epitaphs of the old parties: "Died of general debility, old age, and chronic falsehoods."

Without an advocate for the poor, without a new state of mind in America, the country lies on the brink of anarchy.

Things do go wrong. Not everyone benefits from the capitalist dream.

I think the collision between the First and Third world is going to become more and more conspicuous. It's the big cliff that we've all got to climb.

Back in the thirties we were told we must collectivize the nation because the people were so poor. Now we are told we must collectivize the nation because the people are so rich.

Historic changes and challenges. Breakthroughs in human knowledge and opportunity. And yet, for vast numbers across the globe, the daily realities have not altered.

Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.

To see poor people, their benefits being cut, to see pensions of Americans who have worked like my father, all their lives, and taken away, to see the rich just accumulating more and more wealth. I mean, it seems to me that there has to be a point where you have to say, 'No, this has to stop.'

Nigeria has had the misfortune - no, the fortune - of seeing the worst face of capitalism anywhere in Africa. The masses have seen it, they are disgusted, and they want an alternative.

I would like to solemnly reaffirm, that poverty is not a fatality.

All the legislation in the world cannot fix what is wrong with America.

We will not settle for a state that will settle for an underclass.

It was not until I got down to Latin America that I began to get a political education. Whatever my ideas when I went down there, I saw things around me every day that influenced me. I saw the terrible economic and social conditions, and the injustices that could not be ignored.

To one American family out of four, the idea of capitalism as a benign system of comfort, dignity, and personal advance is only a myth, or worse, a bitter mockery.

Unlike 30 years ago, people now admire the wealth of the West and lament the poverty of China; they stare awestruck at the power of the Western armies and scorn the cowardice of the Imperial troops; they enjoy the fairness and ease of the Customs and detest the fault-finding of China’s own tax collectors; they praise the orderly governance of the Western-Administered cities, and resent the harassment of our officials, big and small.

I was really interested in the way in which poverty and economic stagnation were transforming and corrupting the American narrative.

The global capitalist project, which we are all a part of, leaves people behind. I don't know what the answers are - I don't think any actor does - but figuring it out through entertainment can be very useful.

The cancer that demands our urgent attention is corruption and poverty.

We've got to help our community out. We've got to help Baltimore out, because it's a lot of things that have been handed down in our society that we're dealing with.

If India breaks your heart with untold inequalities, it also surprises you with the unheralded achievements of its most humble citizens.

We forgot that Martin Luther King, Jr. changed his discourse toward the end of his life because he understood that the real fundamental problem of this country was not just race, it was class. It was the economical situation of not only poor blacks but also the poor white part of the population and everything in between.

When my family first moved to Hempstead in the 1960s, they were one of the first black families. It used to be an all-white neighborhood, but there was white flight when the black people with money started moving in. When I was, like, 13 or 14, Hempstead had just become all black, and the poverty became worse and worse.

Corruption is a cancer that steals from the poor, eats away at governance and moral fibre and destroys trust.

We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust. We must dissent from a nation that has buried its head in the sand, waiting in vain for the needs of its poor, its elderly, and its sick to disappear and just blow away. We must dissent from a government that has left its young without jobs, education or hope. We must dissent from the poverty of vision and the absence of moral leadership. We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.

No one so poignantly realizes the failures in the social structure as the man at the bottom, who has been most directly in contact with those failures and has suffered most.