Mo Ibrahim Quotes

I've always been interested in the idea of people who fell through the cracks.

I usually play disenfranchised youth.

There are people in whole parts of our cities who are being totally left behind and disregarded. They are unheard. They are told they are unneeded by this economy. And that extreme poverty breeds conditions for extreme violence.

Inequality causes problems by creating fissures in societies, leaving those at the bottom feeling marginalized or disenfranchised.

At some point or another, everyone has felt unseen and unheard and marginalized.

The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible.

A poor man is like a foreigner in his own country.

The people of Somalia just do not have a voice. They are to me the most forgotten people in the world.

If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.

The power of the word in Morocco belonged to men and to the authorities. No one asked the point of view of poor people or women.

I am sure it must be true that people opt out of the mainstream society because they feel that there are going to be no rewards for them, if they stay.

Poor men's reasons are not heard.

The most underused, under-appreciated group of people in the world is our youth.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

When people lack jobs, opportunity, and ownership of property they have little or no stake in their communities.

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

That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.

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

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.

It's always going to be a fight for anyone who isn't an older white man. I want to fight for anyone who doesn't have a fight.

I challenge British Muslims to accept that as strongly as they feel about Iraq or counter-terrorism measures, poverty and inequality have the biggest impact on the lives of the majority of British Muslims and do the most to prevent potential being fulfilled.

Young people are often ignored and disregarded, but they are acute observers and learners of everything we say and do.

So many people have become divorced from the system, criminalised by their lifestyle.

I gravitate to the world's outcasts.