Irvine Welsh Quotes

Today, if you were raised poor, you're just as likely to stay poor as you were 50 years ago.

I would say basically the commonplace observation that kids aren't going to earn as much as their parents is now is a coin flip at this point. Are you going to do better than your parents? It's a 50-50 chance, whereas if you were born in the 1940s or 1950s, you had more than a 90 percent chance you were going to do better than your parents. So basically almost a guarantee for most kids that you were going to achieve the American Dream of doing better than your parents did. Today, that's certainly no longer the case.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

The American dream is dead for the majority of America.

The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case.

Bums are the well-to-do of this day. They didn't have as far to fall.

If you are poor today, you will always be poor. Only the rich now acquire riches.

Every thing is moving and changing. Persons in poverty, are rising to opulence, and persons of wealth, are sinking to poverty.

The great mass of the poor in countries are become an hereditary race, and it is next to impossible them to get out of that state of themselves

I was one of the poorest people in America.

The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in any of the other advanced industrial countries.

70% of children born into poverty will never make it to the middle class. The uncomfortable truth is that there are now a number of other countries with as much or more opportunity than ours. In fact, more people in Canada go on to surpass the income of their parents than in the United States.

I was born to poor because of honest parents.

The trajectory of this country [USA] is not positive and particularly for the disadvantaged, as we see what's happening. The gains in productivity have dropped, the gains in income for the middle class and the least advantaged have slowed, at best.

If you are low income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than getting a 4-year degree.

America has tolerated inequality because people think they can get ahead. If you have immobility on top of inequality, then people are not going to be happy campers. If you're stuck on the bottom and there just isn't much churning in society and you're stuck there through your adulthood, that's not a nice life to look forward to.

But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution.

Poverty is not intrinsically a trap, otherwise we would all still be poor.

Poor people who had escaped from poverty as I had, feared it, hated it and fled from it all their lives. Those born rich could afford to be touched by it.

He is now rising from affluence to poverty.

The country is filled with energetic and enterprising men, rendered desperate by being reduced from affluence to poverty through the vicissitudes of the times. They will give an impulse to smuggling unknown to the country heretofore.

One of the strangest things about life is that the poor, who need the money the most, are the ones that never have it.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

The goatherds were the poorest people of Spain. Probably, they were the richest.

You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.