Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes

The Latin American people have become fed up with the 500 year siesta and the lack of opportunity. So they come to the United States. But that is because the leaders of their countries do not do anything to improve the situation…. When Mexican President Fox took office he observed that over half the Mexican population was living in poverty and that he was unlikely to make significant changes during his remaining term in office. That was a sophisticated way of saying to the Mexicans, “Go to the United States!”

For too many, the shot for a brighter future is simply out of reach.

I was so glad to get out of the cotton patch and stop pickin' cotton, I wouldn't of cared who come by and said, 'I'll take you to Chicago.'

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.

I myself am from a very poor background; I experienced firsthand poverty in this country, and that is not unrelated to my desire, from the moment I became president, to make a priority of poverty reduction in this country.

Obviously, personal responsibility is important. But there's no evidence that people who are poor are less ambitious than anyone else. In fact, many work long hours at backbreaking jobs.

My parents came from the Kyushu Island in the Southern part of Japan to find work in Tokyo. So we could only afford to live downtown, in a low-income area. It was just by the river, and whenever a typhoon came around, we were under water up to, like, here. That's the kind of place we lived in.

The Negroes are facing the alternative of rising in the sphere of production to supply their proportion of the manufacturers and merchants or of going down to the graves of paupers.

I will keep all our young people from having to abandon their towns and families for the other side of the border

Unequal wealth distribution is a risk factor for inequality that must be attacked by policies.

Preventing poverty beats curing it.

As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish special privilege we are going to see poverty spread and special privilege grow.

What everyone has always wanted in this country, what most came here for, was to get away from all those others who smell bad, are sleeping in a shanty, and are eating fatback and are going to loaf tomorrow because there is no job to go to.

I like the back country, wildlife and all of that, but it's wrong to force poor people to live that way.

Nobody talks about the poor. Everybody talks about the middle class and just kinda want to ignore that the poor exist. And you cannot ignore that they exist if you want to help them.

It has been tough when I have been with the national team and we have gone to play in some of the poorer areas in Brazil. You see people come and watch us train or play a match, and then you know some of them are going home with no food on the plate.

Families in Logan, West Virginia, were going through the same struggles as families in the Bronx, San Francisco, and Houston. This was not a West Virginia problem. This is an American problem, and it has to change.

I'm not supposed to be here. A lot of people from where I'm from don't make it.

I've always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn't worked hard enough. I knew this was a lite, about my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and politicians, harder than anybody if you accept that when you work at an unpleasant job that makes it very hard work indeed.

Poor people always lose in struggles.

As I bent over the washboard and looked at my arms buried in soapsuds, I said to myself, 'What are you going to do when you grow old and your back gets stiff?' This set me to thinking, but with all my thinking I couldn't see how a poor washerwoman was going to better my condition.

The very wealthy have little need for state-provided education or health care... They have even less reason to support health insurance for everyone or to worry about the low quality of public schools that plagues much of the country.

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.

The precariat is today's mass class, which is both dangerous, in rejecting old political party agendas, and transformative, in wanting to become strong enough to be able to abolish itself, to abolish the conditions of insecurity and inequality that define it.

When you grow up on the other side of the tracks, you're used to taking a few bumps.