Maxine Peake Quotes

This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.

I challenge British Muslims to accept that as strongly as they feel about Iraq or counter-terrorism measures, poverty and inequality have the biggest impact on the lives of the majority of British Muslims and do the most to prevent potential being fulfilled.

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.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

We will not settle for a state that will settle for an underclass.

… the submerged tenth

Viciousness and prejudice flow from economic dislocation, and in turn feed it.

Britain is now living with the consequences of allowing an underclass to take root and fester.

These political movements flourish on the margins of Turkish society because of poverty and because of the people's feeling that they are not being represented.

Poor men's reasons are not heard.

Underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions.

While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. And while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

The great mass of the poor in countries are become an hereditary race, and it is next to impossible them to get out of that state of themselves

Class prejudice is applied both the white and black poor, whose demographic traits are converging. But classism combines with latent and historic racism to create a particularly malicious brew. People are now assigned a whole range of supposedly underclass traits based on a single glimpse of skin color.

You can see what happens when people don't feel they have a chance. You can see the ramifications of that.

Poverty is rooted in injustice.

I know what it's like to think the system has left you behind.

If you belong to the underclass, you are already guilty.

There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

People can be so apathetic. They continue to ignore the real people trapped in poverty and homelessness. It's almost maddening.

A poor man is like a foreigner in his own country.

No matter where you from, there's ghettos all over the place.

Criminality is always the result of poverty. Countries that experience such a fundamental change as we have - we had the apartheid regime and must now develop a multicultural democracy - must necessarily pass through a phase of high crime rates.

I usually play disenfranchised youth.

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.