Neil Morrissey Quotes

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

There are no "points of light" for those who sleep on grates and park benches.

If our beggars of England should, with so much ease as they, furnish themselves with food at all seasons, there would not be so many starved in the streets, neither would so many gaoles [jails] be stuffed, or gallouses furnished with poore wretches, as I have seen them.

I was in Vancouver, and I was in what I was told was the poorest neighborhood in North America - which I find very hard to believe because has anyone here ever been to Detroit?

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.

American society as a whole can never achieve the outer-reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair.

I'd been in Sacramento a day and already noticed the pervasiveness of its homeless problem. The city seemed like California without the masks or pretense: a place where dreams were occasionally made but mostly torn apart.

Hundreds of millions of human beings on our planet increasingly suffer from unemployment, poverty, hunger, and the destruction of their families.

We have weapons of mass destruction we have to address here at home. Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction. Homelessness is a weapon of mass destruction. Unemployment is a weapon of mass destruction.

Jamaica full of ghetto, but boy, I tell you: me never see it like that.

I've been in many of them and to some extent I would have to say this; if you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

No city in Italy contains so many miserable beggars, and no town in the world so many blind.

A population sodden with drink, steeped in vice, eaten up by every social and physical malady, these are the denizens of darkest England ... the submerged tenth: Is it then beyond the reach of the nine-tenths in the midst of whom they live.

What a miserable place a city is for poor people.

Local government cannot resolve the health care crisis in America. Local governments cannot resolve the affordable housing problem in America.

Men who were heads of families wandering the streets, eating from garbage cans

There is quite a large clan of Scotties among American beggars. He is a good beggar for the simple reason that he is a good talker. Almost every Scotch beggar I met in the States of America was inclined to be talkative, and yet they all managed to conceal their private affairs.

I left college with a deep sense that I needed to understand poverty more.

We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.

I think solving the problems of America is what's good.

A short distance away from thriving city centres in virtually all of our cities, you will find areas of endemic worklessness, alienation, crime and antisocial behaviour.

Clearly, America has no shortage of metaphorical opportunities for the poor.

[On her father, Ronald Reagan:] How do you argue with someone who states that the people who are sleeping on the grates of the streets of America 'are homeless by choice'?

The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.

If in this wide world, teeming with abundant supplies for human want, to thousands of wretched creatures no choice is open, save between starvation and sin, may we not justly say that there is something utterly wrong in the system that permits such things to be?