Peter Mullan Quotes

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

The carrying power of a bridge is not the average strength of the pillars, but the strength of the weakest pillar. I have always believed that you do not measure the health of a society by GNP but by the condition of its worst off.

'Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream' is an intentionally angry film. How could it not be when the chance of an infant dying is five times greater on the Bronx Park Avenue than on Manhattan's Park Avenue just across the Harlem River?

Mitt Romney has won the 2012 presidential nomination by promising Republicans that he would end a so-called 'culture of dependency' on welfare - welfare defined as 'free stuff' and food stamps for poor folks, not tax breaks for Big Oil or tax shelters for Bain executives.

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

There is another world out there, the existence of which the Court, I suspect, either chooses to ignore or fears to recognize. And so the cancer of poverty will continue to grow.

Poor men's words have little weight.

Yet today our splendid theory of government is confronted by a great peril. We have become blind to evils that menace us. We are confronted with glutted markets and idle labor. It is a condition that makes it possible for a few men to become landlords of a proud city like this while God's poor are packed in the slums. Such a condition is not only a menace to Republican institutions, but a travesty upon the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important.

The poorest still deserve help with life's basic necessities regardless of the quality of their government.

The Government should be taking notice of the youth of today so much more. They're trying to keep the rich, rich and the poor, poor. If I sat down with David Cameron in a room, I would ask him how he feels about it and what the hell he's doing about it.

When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one - it's the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky - in the big cities, too, for that matter.

Greater inequality in Europe has made people less happy.

When we see people that are impoverished and people who are dealt an unfair hand, then if we have the power to help them, we should try to do that.

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.

If you have extremes of haves and have-nots where the gap keeps growing, the have-nots group together and create social disorder, as they can't see a way out of their situation.

When you talk about war on poverty it doesn't mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today.

Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.

A considerable share of the world's population still cannot afford comfortable housing, education and quality health care.

We have to challenge the whole idea that it's acceptable for a society like Britain to have such a significant number of people who do not work one day of the week and don't have any possibility of improving the quality of their lives.

Imagine a society in which there were neither rich nor poor. What evils, afflictions, sorrows, disorders, catastrophes, disasters, tribulations, misfortunes, agonies, calamities, despair, desolation and ruin would be unknown to man!

You can spend the money on new housing for poor people and the homeless, or you can spend it on a football stadium or a golf course.

I think one of the biggest mistakes that America has made - and maybe the world because this is, sort of, the core of communism and socialism - is that you can have perfect solutions to social problems like poverty, like crime. You're not going to eliminate all crime. Maybe you'll never eliminate all poverty.