John Lydon Quotes

The poor prey on one another because their lives offer no hope and communicate the tragic message to these human beings that they have no possibility to attain a decent standard of living.

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.

The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.

The rich stick together; the poor and the marginalised are thrown together.

In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless.

I'm concerned about - the oppression of the poor.

Poor men's reasons are not heard.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.

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.

If the Negro in the ghetto must eternally be fed by the hand that pushes him into the ghetto, he will never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto.

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.

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.

One must denounce the economic, financial, and social mechanisms and structures that are manipulated by the rich and powerful for their own benefit at the expense of the poor

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

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

Our poor white people . . . are suffered to while away an existence in a state but one step in advance of the Indian of the forest.

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.

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

I've seen a lot of poverty - coming up as a young child, lost hopes and dreams and people that never had a chance to have a decent quality of life. I believe we can do a lot greater than that.

The rich rob the poor, and the poor rob one another.

Poverty is rooted in injustice.

Ordinary people understand that the rich and powerful bully the poor and meek.

The familiar mood that awaits the sensitive young who are poor and dispossessed is a mood of sharp and painful inferiority, of violently angry tensions, of desperate and overwhelming longings.

I think that there always have been and always will be at least two Americas - the poor America, the second America, tends to be in the shadows. Sometimes it's an America of people in a ghetto of color, sometimes it's an economic ghetto, but definitely there is a parallel America which people in the dominant America prefer to ignore if they can.