Arvind Kejriwal Quotes

We aren't living the gospel of democracy and free enterprise today. We are merely preaching it. We have made only half of the combination work, and we've done that superlatively well. Free enterprise booms. But democracy staggers and reels under oppressive debts and inordinate operating costs-both the consequences of political failure.

I think there's a feeling of - a grassroots feeling of being betrayed by the elites in some way: that the system is working for itself and not for the people at the bottom.

If I’m a young black man in South Central L.A., where poverty is rampant and unemployment is skyrocketing, I see that Washington’s promises of a year ago have gone unfulfilled, I see that perhaps for a second time, the court’s inability to mete out justice in a blind fashion, why shouldn’t I vent my anger?

I think one of the biggest mistakes that America has made - and maybe the world because this is, sort of, the core of communism and socialism - is that you can have perfect solutions to social problems like poverty, like crime. You're not going to eliminate all crime. Maybe you'll never eliminate all poverty.

What is black empowerment when it seems to benefit not the vast majority but an elite that tends to be recycled?

Remember, until the 1970s, the spread of democracy has always been accompanied by the decline of inequality. The more democratic our societies have been, the more equal they have been becoming. Now we have the reverse tendency. The spread of democracy now is very much accompanied by the increase in inequality.

I feel bad for the kids that are in school right now and the young people all across America who don't realize that the grownups who are supposed to be running this country are the verge of leaving them as the first generation of Americans worse off than the generation before.

We cannot give our students all that they expect, whether by way of the quality of their schooling or by way of the jobs that they were hoping to get. Student frustration is a worldwide phenomenon, pushing our societies into adjusting faster than they are used to.

We are afraid to face the hard questions. We are willing to tackle drugs, crime, and public education only if it doesn't cost us any new taxes.

Pakistan is riddled with problems that are rooted in the disproportionate power of the state. Aid has only boosted that power.

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

It was a slow understanding that the lack of education in a country like Somalia creates these huge social problems.

The political class has failed you.

We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course. Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic.

The politicians are preparing a worse world for our children than the one they were born into…

All the legislation in the world cannot fix what is wrong with America.

Why should there be such abject poverty?

A person who steals a chicken might go to jail … but a person who steals millions is welcome to be a member of the Federation Council or the Duma.

The greatest problem we [in Kenya] face is the growing number of people living in poverty. The related sense of hopelessness has to be impacting on every part of environmental management.

How can we continue to condone a system which heals those who can pay but says to hell with those who can't.

To one American family out of four, the idea of capitalism as a benign system of comfort, dignity, and personal advance is only a myth, or worse, a bitter mockery.

The system seems to most people as rigged, and it is.

As long as inequality and other social problems plague us, populists will try to exploit them.

One of the most frustrating things is to see a country in which you had elections, the elections were a success, but then you have to say to people nothing can be improved in the next few months, even in the next few years, in infrastructure, in water, in sanitation, in health, in education, in jobs.

If we continue to tolerate this level of poverty in our cities, and go along with eviction as commonplace in poor neighborhoods, it's not for a lack of resources. It will be a lack of something else.