Harvey Gantt Quotes

I grew up in a council house in a poor Scottish town. I came of age during the recession of the mid-1980s when unemployment in my area reached 40 per cent.

The number one thing I will take with me is my experience as a social worker who saw what happened to families who couldn't find jobs, struggled to take care of their health and saw opportunity slipping away for their kids. I ran for Congress because politicians were fighting with each other instead of looking out for these families.

A lot of unemployed families were moved to Hastings, and places were built for them. They're communities of unemployed people. It's been difficult dealing with that.

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

While some people are certainly seeing economic benefits, many others are unemployed, underemployed, without health insurance and struggling to make ends meet.

When you talk about war on poverty it doesn't mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today.

What keeps me up at night is poverty and unemployment.

All Democrats are not entitlement people. These are the people who are going to suffer the cost of Obama health care. These are the people who are suffering because there're no jobs.

You don't have to be impoverished to understand poverty.

The Bronx, I remember, was a very poor neighborhood, but that was all that immigrants could afford at that time. Life was tough. I grew up - my father didn't have a job, but there weren't too many people who did have jobs.

As I have traveled the state, I have seen firsthand that there are Arizonans who are hurting.

I was one of the poorest people in America.

I loathed poverty and I would have liked to put my hands on the party who said that poverty is an honorable estate. It is an indication of inefficiency and nothing more. There is nothing honorable or fine about it.

There are a great number of Mexicans who live every day worried about the lack of employment and opportunities. Those conditions also damage the image of Mexico abroad, and that is the Mexico that must be transformed.

While Haiti has recently celebrated more than 200 years of independence from French colonial rule, the citizens of the island remain vulnerable to poverty, poor health, and political chaos.

Short of genius a rich man cannot even imagine poverty.

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

I think if you touch ordinary people, they're simply ordinary people, the way they've always been. They work hard, they don't have really as much as they should.

I lived for two years in an abandoned gas station with no running water and no electricity after my parents got divorced and my stepdad couldn't get a job. So I think a lot about families like mine who were middle class and struggled. So that experience really drives my philosophy.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

I come from Main Street, from a small town that's really depressed.

Unemployment is a great tragedy. The man who goes about hopelessly seeking work in order to earn bread for his children is a living reproach to civilization.

Being unemployed is even more disastrous for individuals than you'd expect. Aside from the obvious harm - poverty, difficulty paying off debts - it seems to directly affect people's health, particularly that of older workers.

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

The goatherds were the poorest people of Spain. Probably, they were the richest.