Studs Terkel Quotes

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck.

You have to be interested in inequality. The issue of inequality and that of poverty are not separable.

Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.

When I find too many puzzles about the way explanations are given about why there is inequality - why people who work the hardest in the world end up being the poorest - I can't just sit back and not try to understand why the gaps between people are increasing, or why there are so many homeless and hungry people in the world.

I do not think an enormous permanent underclass is a very good thing to have if you're attempting to operate something that at least pretends sometimes to be a democracy.

I was once a welfare recipient and am very aware of the successes and failures of this critical safety net. There are those that would have us believe that those receiving TANF benefits are lazy, shiftless, freeloaders who are just sitting around thinking of another way to suckle from the government teat.

The issue of wealth inequality is ... the great moral issue of our time.

Only the poor are forbidden to beg.

The association of poverty with progress is the enigma of our times.

The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, no worse, for a people than another.

Inequality is bad for everyone, not just the middle class and the poor.

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.

America's dumpsters should not be better fed than its people.

The miserable consumption of the poor is partly the result of the ostentatious demands of the rich. There isn't enough for both, and the latter get far more than they need...But could anything seriously be done about it?

People don't need to become more aware of poverty - they need to know how to end it.

The United States of America is the richest country in the world; yet we're the worst at taking care of poor people.

We know by now how to photograph poor people. What we don't know is how to photograph affluence - whose other face is poverty.

Gates's net wealth is greater than the combined net worth of the poorest 40% of Americans (112,000,000 people).

A nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much and so many have so little.

Nobody should be hitting lotto for 36 million dollars when we got people starving in the streets. That is not idealistic, that's just real. That is just stupid. There's no way Michael Jackson, or whoever should have thousands, millions, billions of dollars and we got people broke with two-three jobs and still can't pay bills on time. There's no way! No way these people should have planes when people don't have houses, apartments, shacks, drawers, pants!!!

Pity would be no more, If we did not make somebody poor. Mercy no more could be, If all were happy as we.

In America, the poor have been invisibilised, because obviously this model of success that has been held out to the world must not show the poor, it must not show the condition of black people. It can only the successful ones, basketball players, musicians, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. But I think the time will come when the Occupy movement will have to somehow formulate something more than just anger.

Abraham Lincoln was on the side of the social scientists when he said, "God must have loved the people of lower and middle socioeconomic status, because he made such a multiplicity of them.

Poverty does not create our social problems...our social problems create our poverty.

It's always the rich and there's plenty to waste, yet still China has a lot of people living in very spare, poor conditions.