Brian May Quotes

When our economy is not growing, those least able to look after themselves are the first thrown overboard ...

Austerity is devastating these communities. The working poor, public sector workers, the disabled, and the vulnerable are the hardest hit by this bankrupt and ideologically driven policy.

It's difficult to write about poverty in a way that doesn't feel cliched.

Contrary to popular belief. It's much wiser to take money from the poor than the rich.

Somebody has been cashing checks, and they've been bouncing back on us. And these people, the poor class of Negroes and the poor class of white people, they're getting tired of it.

During the Great Depression, African Americans were faced with problems that were not unlike those experienced by the most disadvantaged groups in society. The Great Depression had a leveling effect, and all groups really experienced hard times: poor whites, poor blacks.

Poverty is an open-mouthed, relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society.

Increase of slaves in this colony is injurious to the poor and inconvenient

Yet today our splendid theory of government is confronted by a great peril. We have become blind to evils that menace us. We are confronted with glutted markets and idle labor. It is a condition that makes it possible for a few men to become landlords of a proud city like this while God's poor are packed in the slums. Such a condition is not only a menace to Republican institutions, but a travesty upon the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Poverty is a corrosive brew, capable of eating away at the underpinnings of democratic life itself.

Heavy rents which are become so great a burden to us that we are not scarcely able to bear. Between landlord and rectors, the very marrow is screwed out of our bones ….They have reduced us to such a deplorable state by such grievous oppressions that the poor is turned black in the face … and they are rendered incapable to support their starving families … that they have not even food, nor raiment to secure them from the extremes of weather.

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 struggling masses

In a way, no one's harder on the poor than the poor themselves.

Wars breed unfairness, just as they breed collateral damage.

We know that Brexit would make our poorest communities poorer still. That it would make the powerless even less able to effect change.

I was shocked when I came to New Orleans. I never knew there were beggars on the streets here. I didn't know that there were poor people. I thought this was Heaven, you know?

It's hard to get people to empathize with the poor. You can get some people to sympathize with the poor, but to empathize is actually very hard, because most people are not poor. I realized that scarcity gives you a thread.

If the market is left to sort matters out, social injustice will be heightened and suffering in the community will grow with the neglect the market fosters.

Nobody is poor unless he stand in need of justice.

I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people.

Every day I've got to hear about unemployment and people starving.

You must go deeper into Russia - 150 kilometres from Moscow or more, and look there. The kids are fed with cattle feed - people don't get paid for half a year.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

Over one in five American children is living in poverty, and the number is rising.