George Miller Quotes

I see my friends, my family, my cousins work all day long for very little money, and if I have this problem of not being able to wall on the streets, it's not a big deal.

This hunger for profits causes great misery for the people.

Our mothers and fathers want change. They worked all of their lives, but today live in destitution.

In prosperous times, the marginal workers get by. But in tough times, they get the shaft.

The tax collector must love poor people, he's creating so many of them.

I could actually care less about the poor. We have some living near us, and pee-yew. They are always coming and going to their three or four jobs at all hours of the day and night. Annoying!

Poverty does not make people terrorists, but terrorists can exploit the frustration it creates and use it as a breeding-ground for violent ideas.

Poverty is the mother of crime.

Poverty doesn't imply necessarily violence.

Capitalism has only hurt Latin America.

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.

Leaders of the business community ... have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in this country - a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old. .

Poverty is slavery.

Poverty makes slaves of free men.

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

Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street... Over 100,000 shopgirls are forced to sell their virtue for the bread their niggardly wages deny them.

“I make you free,” so speak the Rights of Man to the laborer, “free to earn a wretched living and turn your employer into a millionaire; free to sell him your liberty for a mouthful of bread. He will imprison you ten hours or twelve hours in his workshops; he will not let you go till you are wearied to the marrow of your bones, till you have just enough strength left to gulp down pour soup and sink into a heavy sleep. You have but one of your rights that you may not sell, and that is the right to pay taxes.

Pullman, who has grown so rich from the toil of his workingmen, that he can riot in luxury, while he heartlessly turns these very workmen out of their tenements into the streets and leave to the tender mercies of corporate greed.

The working classes may be injuriously degraded and oppressed in three ways: 1st — When they are neglected in infancy. 2nd — When they are overworked by their employer, and are thus rendered incompetent from ignorance to make a good use of high wages when they can procure them. 3rd — When they are paid low wages for their labor

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.

... the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.

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.

The chaos of poverty feeds on itself.

In the final analysis, poverty is a condition of helplessness - of inability to cope with the conditions of existence in our complex society.