Matthew Desmond Quotes

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

Poverty and lack of education are ruining our planet.

A shining city is perhaps all the President [Ronald Reagan] sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there's another part to the shining city. In this part of the shining city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, and more people who need help and can't find it.

This dear bought Land with so much blood and cost, hath only made some few rich, and all the rest losers.

Economic inequality is a corrosive force that undermines economic growth, puts a brake on the fight against poverty, and sparks social unrest.

I think it's criminal the way poverty is allowed to flourish.

Poverty is a result of lack of opportunity. Lack of opportunity is about being without power, without being in a position to make choices.

A lot of people, including me, are worried that inequality will lead to bad things.

Disparity is Australia's worst social problem. Thousands of lives are slowly being crushed, while billions are wasted on thousands of little initiatives trying to 'close the gap.'

People can be so apathetic. They continue to ignore the real people trapped in poverty and homelessness. It's almost maddening.

It's maddening in my travels to watch children dying simply because they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

What I quickly discovered is that our so-called new South Africa has as much material for a story-teller as the old one. The landscape hasn't really changed. Who is in power now is different to who was in power then, but the squatter camps grow like cancer, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

Anarchy may await America, due to the daily injustices suffered by the people.

I don't want to see that two-tier Senegal, that two-tier Africa, when you have those at the top and those at the bottom, people who are hungry, people who do not have enough to eat.

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.

The economy is not governed with the bottom half in mind.

Everything the working class has been told to do, the rich do not do. That is my message.

As of today, we do not need expert reports by the authoritative analytical institutions to realise that the reasons for such a situation in our community lie in global inequality, poverty and illiteracy.

Inequality doesn't create unhappiness.

In the days and months I spent walking through the various communities of this city, I found that Chicago did not work for everyone, however.

Poverty is everyone's problem. It cuts across any line you can name: age, race, social, geographic or religious. Whether you are black or white; rich, middle-class or poor, we are ALL touched by poverty.

Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.

Corporate America cannot afford to remain silent or passive about the downward spiral we are undergoing. It cannot turn a blind eye to how difficult the experience of life is for so many of their customers.

Well, we ought to be stirred, even to tears, by society's ills.

We don't need flowery words about inequality to tell us that, and we don't need a party that has led while poverty and hunger rose to record levels to give us lectures about suffering.