Harold H. Greene Quotes

A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

Just because you are poor and have no voice does not mean that you don’t deserve police protection.

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.

We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.

There is one class of men, whom it especially behoves to be tenacious of the right of free discussion. I mean the poor.

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

I'm concerned about - the oppression of the poor.

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.

To deal with radicalism and extremism, we need to deal with economic inequality. This is what I learned from my experience in Solo and then in Jakarta.

The rich don’t want the poor to get ahead of them.

I believe in preferring the sanctity of human rights to the sanctity of property rights. I believe that the chief concern of government shall be for the poor because, as it is witnessed, the rich have ample means of their own to care for themselves.

This is the great moral issue of our day. 37 million people who live in poverty. It’s wrong.

Government has a responsibility to the have-nots.

The present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but a stepping stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich.

Who takes the blame: the leader who talks of poverty but lives in luxury, or the poor who choose a leader of that type?

A New Dealer regrets poverty and deplores the fact that it is necessary for society to slough off its misfits as an individual sheds his impurities and his diseases. But New Dealers believe that human want and human distress should be prevented or at least ameliorated.

In the last era of the [civil rights] movement, the disenfranchised were the blacks, the colored. Now the disenfranchised are the have-nots, the unemployed, the hungry.

A change of mentality is needed, no longer seeing the poor as a burden, or as intruders trying to profit from others, but as people seeking to share the goods of the world so that we can create a just and prosperous world for all.

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.

Problems of persistent poverty cannot be addressed unless they are acknowledged.

We used to wage war on poverty—not poor people.

It takes a lot of punishment to be able to do anything to change the social order.

Wherever democracy has prevailed, the power of the State has been used in some form or other to plunder the well-to-do classes for the benefit of the poor.

The Forgotten Man

We, as Canadians, have no hesitation lecturing the rest of the world on what they should be doing, how they shouldn't discriminate, and how they should treat the poor. That same discrimination - unfairness that exists in so many of these countries - has been practised for years in our own country.