John Hume Quotes

There is sometimes a tendency to assume that everyone in this great country has adequate housing. But when you go to certain places, certain neighborhoods, both urban and rural, you find out that's not the case, and I think we have to do much more.

In one sense, Obama's point couldn't be clearer: race is a distraction from class-based inequities. And if we dismiss working-class resentment as camouflaged racism, we will continue to be distracted by the spectre of race.

A more courageous empathy is needed in our country to see the struggles of people from factory towns to farm towns to city towns who can't even afford the rent in their cities anymore because costs are going so high.

What kind of city are we living in, if we encourage the development or ownership of large, expensive properties for investment and land banking... while people are sleeping on the streets?

People don't have fortunes left them in that style nowadays; men have to work and women to marry for money. It's a dreadfully unjust world.

We need wealthy dogs off the seats of power. They're taking us back to feudalism and I really don't want that. But I'm very far from being a socialist.

Every government that exists -- or ever existed, or ever will exist -- is a kleptocracy, meaning "rule by thieves". Competing ideologies merely provide different excuses to separate the Productive Class from what they produce.

How soon the labor of men would make a paradise of the whole earth, were it not for misgovernment, and a diversion of all his energies from their proper object -- the happiness of man -- to the selfish interest of kings, nobles, and priests.

The death-knell of the republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others.

There isn't profit to be made off low-rent housing, and it's time we acknowledge that, instead of perverting a system around maintaining private ownership.

Capitalists personally are often the mildest-mannered men that ever shattered a family or drained a workingman of his marrow.

There is plenty of affordable housing —it is simply occupied by the wrong people.... The problem in New York is not high rents, but low incomes.

Whatever is good for the People is bad for their Governors; and what is good for the Governors is pernicious for the People.

The workingmen have been exploited all the way up and down the line by employers, landlords, everybody.

The saddest part is that the public officials, both State and Federal, are in league with the capitalists in making the rich richer, and the poor poorer.

The supreme issue, involving all others, is the encroachment of the powerful few on the rights of the many. It is against the system built up by privilege that we must make unceasing warfare.

The English proletariat lives under such wretched conditions that a few extra privations will not cause it much discomfort.

Capitalists … can grow rich only where there is an oppressed body of labourers

There are no limits to which powers of privilege will not go to keep the workers in slavery.

... wholly in the interest of the creditor classes, the banking fraternity, and the commercial world, without proper provision for the debtor classes and those who toil, produce and sustain the country.

If you people can’t afford to live in our town, then you’ll just have to leave.

Mr. Watson belongs to that school of southern Populists who honestly believe that the respectable and commonplace people who own banks, railroads, dry goods stores, factories, and the like, are persons of mental and social attributes that unpleasantly distinguish Heliogabalus, Nero, Caligula, and other worthies of later Rome.... If he got the chance he would lash the nation with a whip of scorpions

In modern megalopolis the very men who make the city, who clean its streets and shovel its coal and run its subway trains, may be exiled from it when they quit work at night. To-day in New York the average worker simply cannot provide a decent home for himself on the average wage. We have been so victimized by the spirit of the real estate speculator that we have almost forgotten the logical ideal of a city as a pleasant place for common people to live together.

History is written by the rich so the poor get blamed for everything.

If anyone’s declared class warfare, it’s the people who inhabit the top rungs of big corporations and Wall Street … They have declared it on average workers.