Lou Reed Quotes

People who had been treated inhumanly, not given a chance to secure any foot on any ladder - and all the social mores were suddenly abandoned.

These political movements flourish on the margins of Turkish society because of poverty and because of the people's feeling that they are not being represented.

I am from the class that has, in a sense, benefited from the status quo, but everyone still gets victimized.

Unless you've been touched personally, it's difficult to see, but there are millions of people who have no voice whatsoever.

Keeping people on the margins of cultural, social and political life constitutes in many nations one of the most glaring injustices of our time.

I spend my life around people that are, like, bad people, if you want, and then deep down they're not. It's just the circumstances they've been given. A majority of people that are standoffish, it's because they lack the feeling that they're connecting to anything or that there's opportunity for them to get anything.

I know what it's like to think the system has left you behind.

If too many people feel excluded from the system and cannot access its benefits, they will ultimately rebel against it.

Once any group in society stands in a relatively deprived position in relation to other groups, it is genuinely deprived.

The people that are the invisible ones, the marginalized, the quote-unquote weirdos, the people that get things thrown at them, the people that get harassed every day just for existing . . . I just still strongly align with them.

We live in a world where not everyone has the urge to help others... It is OK to encourage others to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, but if you do, just remember that some people have no boots.

One thing that you consistently see everywhere is that the poor and the under-represented are always the ones who are going to suffer the most and get the short end of the stick.

Poverty is not just a material problem. Poverty is something wider: it is about powerlessness, about being deprived of basic opportunities and freedom of choice.

Today it is fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately, it is not fashionable to talk with them.

There's a vast class - the poor, the underprivileged, the people least likely to vote - who are not represented any more.

But we have created a society that does not allow opportunities for those people to take care of themselves because we have denied them those opportunities.

One of the things that I'm really concerned about is that people who don't have power are not priorities for people in public life. Maybe it's always been that way, but I see it more starkly now.

I choose the poverty of our poor people. But I am grateful to receive it (the Nobel) in the name of the hungry, the naked, the homeless, of the crippled, of the blind, of the lepers, of all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone.

I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues … allow them a language as lousy as their life

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

The oppressed never free themselves - they do not have the necessary strengths.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.