Geoffrey Canada Quotes

It is widely known that the effects of childhood poverty follow children through adolescence and into adulthood.

Poor children fare worse than rich children on just about everything that social scientists measure.

They do not easily rise whose abilities are repressed by poverty at home.

The capacity of children to become self-sufficient and successful adults is compromised not only by monetary poverty, but by poverty of experience, influence, and expectation

I am deeply concerned about the impact of poverty on children because poverty can destroy their future and bind them to a life of misery.

Child poverty is more than an abstract problem to me. It's something I know all too much about.

At one stage, I didn't have any money, so I slept on the streets for a few nights. It wasn't uncommon in the 1950s, and it wasn't uncommon to be out of money. There wasn't anywhere to go to get money.

I know what it means to go to the stream to fetch water... what it means when people are poor and don't have enough to eat. It's not enough to say you know about poverty. You have to live it.

I suspect most politicians feel overwhelmed because people's lives are a real struggle, full of unhappiness, and you would probably feel powerless to do anything about it.

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

Within the black community, roughly 60 percent of children are born to single moms. Moms don't have the emotional wherewithal to deal with their children. Their English is atrocious. Their speaking is atrocious. The dropout rate is horrendous.

Did you know that nearly one in three children live apart from their biological dads? Those kids are two to three times more likely to grow up in poverty, to suffer in school, and to have health and behavioral problems.

When poverty shows itself, even mischievous boys understand what it means.

All over the world, children facing the challenges of poverty attend schools that aren't designed to meet their extra needs; across country lines, the lives of marginalized kids look far more similar than they do different.

Conservatives highlight the primacy of family and argue that family breakdown exacerbates poverty, and they're right. Children raised by single parents are three times as likely to live in poverty as kids in two-parent homes.

Poverty was the greatest motivating factor in my life.

Poverty us no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.

The worst part of great poverty is that you become blind to it.

What too few people mention when discussing crime is the degree to which concentrated poverty, hopelessness and despair are the chambermaids of violence and incivility.

Hunger, inadequate medical care, poor housing, and inferior schools are enemies of the sense of wonder. It is easier and less expensive in the long run to prevent a loss of imagination by providing adequate nutrition, housing, medical care, and schooling than it is to try to restore that loss.

My father was an urchin that lived in Hell's Kitchen. He was part of a family of nine. I mean, there were times that were better and worse, but mostly, by the time we got to L.A., they'd lost whatever they had. And it was a sad time. And both he and I became truck drivers for different companies.

I gained direct knowledge of the life of the poor in big towns: I have lived the narrowing mechanism of its conditioning and feared it.

Poverty must have many satisfactions, else there would not be so many poor people.

I get a lot of single mum roles - 'It's a Free World' turned out well, so people thought, 'She can be a single mum, Kierston can do that. Or live in a council house - she can do that.'

I was born and raised in the ghetto, on welfare, two minutes from homeless.