Maya Angelou Quotes

There are people in whole parts of our cities who are being totally left behind and disregarded. They are unheard. They are told they are unneeded by this economy. And that extreme poverty breeds conditions for extreme violence.

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

Hurricane Katrina was a disaster. It exposed the soft underbelly of America when it comes to race and class.

My perspective is never gonna change on that... We've got to do a much better job to take care of poor people, because you cannot put all the poor people in bad neighborhoods, send them to bad schools, and say, 'Good luck in life.' That's just not right.

When you socially neglect a people, when you economically abandon a people, when you transfer wealth from them to the well-to-do, what are a people going to do? They're going to respond with very sad forms of despair, and that's true for everybody - I don't care what color you are.

We've got to help our community out. We've got to help Baltimore out, because it's a lot of things that have been handed down in our society that we're dealing with.

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

I think that when we're talking about youth violence, we're talking about kids who don't have opportunities, so they're engaged in a certain degree of lawlessness, because we as a society have failed them.

American society as a whole can never achieve the outer-reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair.

I think we've made tremendous progress on racism. We've even made progress on war. We've made almost no progress on poverty.

All too often, government's response to social breakdown has been a classic case of 'patching' - a case of handing money out, containing problems and limiting the damage but, in doing so, supporting - even reinforcing - dysfunctional behaviour.

I'm not the kind of writer who's able to block out the world around me. I'm mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about our precarious economic and political climate.

Corporate America cannot afford to remain silent or passive about the downward spiral we are undergoing. It cannot turn a blind eye to how difficult the experience of life is for so many of their customers.

That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.

This nation has always struggled with how it was going to deal with poor people and people of color. Every few years you will see some great change in the way that they approach this. We've had the war on poverty that never really got into waging a real war on poverty.

Crime is a tax on the poor

No matter how big a nation is, it is no stronger than its weakest people…

There is another world out there, the existence of which the Court, I suspect, either chooses to ignore or fears to recognize. And so the cancer of poverty will continue to grow.

America’s real majority is suffering a minority complex of neglect. They have become the real foes of Negro rights, foreign aid, etc, because … they feel forgotten, at the second table behind the tightly organized smaller groups at either end of the U. S. spectrum.

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

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

The Forgotten Man

I cannot possibly believe that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare.

We've lost our way if we turn our backs on millions of Americans in need.

Liberals have to get more comfortable with dealing with the poor as they actually are. I admire their refusal to look down on the least among us, but at some level, that can become an excuse to never really look at the problem at all.