Malcolm X Quotes

Now we just showin' and provin' that there's a ghetto everywhere you go.

How does one endure in a place they shouldn't be condemned to live in? You could take that same question and apply it to any number of neighborhoods in any number of cities.

No matter where you from, there's ghettos all over the place.

Ghetto isn't a place. Ghetto is more in the mind and how you feel about your life.

In Paris, where I live, the inner neighborhoods are only available to the white elite. The poor and dispossessed are shuffled out to suburbs and never seen.

There are cultural reasons, economic competitiveness reasons. There are a lot of reasons why people are in poverty. The difference today is that increasingly they are in perpetual poverty.

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.

What too few people mention when discussing crime is the degree to which concentrated poverty, hopelessness and despair are the chambermaids of violence and incivility.

I think there's an element where people get very comfortable in their ghetto. Which is fair enough.

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

It's important for me to go back into the ghetto, where I'm from. I still get my oxygen from there. I don't live in the ghetto anymore, but every time I go back, I'm still seeing the same things that I lived.

I was born and raised in the ghetto, on welfare, two minutes from homeless.

There are still some black youth growing up in ghettoes in this country who will never know a white person—not even speak to one.

The wiping out of crime is so largely an economic question because much crime arises from the fact that children grow up in undesirable surroundings and have parents that have been conditioned by the same type of environment.

I do remember the numbers runners, I do remember the poverty and bread lines. Harlem stays with you forever.

Since 1980, Republican shredding of the social safety net has disproportionately hit women, particularly women of colour.

I've been an activist since I was a teenager. I was always curious about what we would now call social justice. I remember just trying to navigate growing up poor in an overpoliced environment with a single mother and a father who was in and out of prison.

One consequence of racism and segregation is that many American whites know little or nothing about the daily lives of African Americans. Black America's least-understood communities are those poor, hyper-segregated places we once called ghettos. These neighborhoods are not far away, but they might as well be on the moon.

You see, I was born in the slums, that was before the ghetto. The ghetto was kind of refined; the slums was right there on the ground.

I think the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. I don't think the black people are going to rise at all; I think most of them are going to die.

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

American society as a whole can never achieve the outer-reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair.

If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.

Criminality is always the result of poverty. Countries that experience such a fundamental change as we have - we had the apartheid regime and must now develop a multicultural democracy - must necessarily pass through a phase of high crime rates.

Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed of it, is.