Social Despair Quotes

White-on-black shootings evoke America's history of racism and so carry an iconic payload of menace. Black-on-black shootings carry no such payload, although they are truly menacing to the black community. They evoke only despair.

In Chicago, a lot of people don't really got nothing to live for. Everybody can't ball. Everybody can't rap. Nobody is really doing those activities. There's nothing to do but the streets.

Under the leaden sway of Alexander III's government, the silence of the graveyard prevailed. Russian society, equally discouraged by the collapse of all hopes for peaceful reforms and by the apparent ineffectiveness of the revolutionary movement, was in the grip of a mood of depression and resignation.

Terrorism grows when there are no other options, and when the center of the global economy is the god of money and not the person - men and women - this is already the first terrorism!

When a society lacks God, even prosperity is joined by a terrible spiritual poverty.

The worst thing that can happen in a democracy - as well as in an individual's life - is to become cynical about the future and lose hope.

People have nothing to lose. Government has stripped them of their dignity and their respect.

The poor prey on one another because their lives offer no hope and communicate the tragic message to these human beings that they have no possibility to attain a decent standard of living.

Not only are a voteless people a hopeless people. A non-producing people are hopeless also.

One out of three black men are in the criminal justice system in some form. Their despair is beginning to resonate through the entire culture; that is why suburban children want rap music.

Jihad has tremendously affected Pakistani society. With increasing poverty, most people have very little to do with their lives. In this uneducated society, they have found a solution - an irrational solution - to their problems. They don't want to labor to find better solutions. They think if they wage jihad all their problems will be solved. It is very interesting: all their problems are worldly, and the solution is spiritual. But when they join jihad, they forget about their worldly problems. The Kalashnikov in their hands gives them respect, power and raison d'etre. Somebody who has nothing in life and nothing to lose, who has been for many years idling away his time in the streets of a Pakistani village, suddenly finds a cause to live for in a jihadi camp.

If the Africans and Arabs were ruling Spain from 711 to 1492, had they destroyed the Catholic church, they still would be ruling Spain to this day because that's the institution that held them together. The institute that gave them the only hope was their church. This is why we are so depressed because the institutions of hope that would cause fulfillment amongst us has either been destroyed or laughed at.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

The absence of hope can rot a society from within.

The young men in the inner city are without guidance, robbing and shooting each other with no remorse... Our system is crazy because we're planning to fail. Everybody needs something to grasp on to.

I suspect that young adults crave stories of broken futures because they themselves are uneasily aware that their world is falling apart.

Bent out of shape from society's pliers, cares not to come up any higher, but rather get you down in the hole that he's in.

At the bottom of the social heap is the black man in the big-city ghetto. He lives night and day with the rats and the cockroaches and drowns himself with alcohol and anesthetizes himself with dope, to try and forget where and what he is. That Negro has given up all hope. He's the hardest one for us to reach, because he's the deepest in the mud. But when you get him, you've got the best kind of Muslim. I look upon myself as a prime example of this category - as graphic an example as you could find of the salvation of the black man.

The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.

If we get setbacks and if something happens where the Civil Rights Bill is watered down, for instance, if the Negro feels that he can do nothing but move from one ghetto to another and one slum to another, the despair and the disappointment will be so great that it will be very difficult to keep the struggle disciplined and nonviolent.

There are moments when rather than reforming the human race I'd like to abandon it altogether and go become, say, one of Dr. O'Reilly's macaques, which have to have more sense.

...failure is a human condition, not victory over odds; for each Hellen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot.