Disadvantaged Communities Quotes

I’d rather be a lamppost in Harlem than the mayor of any town in Georgia.

My family has been poor and working-class for generations. And we live - I live in this really small community in Southern Mississippi where you don't evacuate, and you have never evacuated because there are too many people in your family to evacuate.

When you allow racial disparity and institutional inequity to affect one part of the country, eventually it's coming back to get everyone.

Capitalism has only hurt Latin America.

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

I see tens of millions of its citizens--a substantial part of its whole population--who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life.

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

It doesn't do good to open doors for someone who doesn't have the price to get in. If he has the price, he may not need the laws. There is no law saying the Negro has to live in Harlem or Watts.

On our toughest estates, generations pass with the same experience of worklessness and educational failure.

Drag a $100 bill through a trailer camp and there's no telling what you will find.

A shining city is perhaps all the President [Ronald Reagan] sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there's another part to the shining city. In this part of the shining city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, and more people who need help and can't find it.

While no community is immune to the impacts of COVID-19, I'm troubled by the disparate impact to communities of color.

It was a slow understanding that the lack of education in a country like Somalia creates these huge social problems.

I've been around low-income people all of my life. I mean, growing up, low income, the community where I've chosen to live, low-income.

I'm interested in people who have to overcome obstacles, people who are not sheltered by the umbrella of the establishment, marginals.

When you're poor and black in America, you stand a greater chance of going to prison for something you didn't do.

I'm not supposed to be here. A lot of people from where I'm from don't make it.

White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White society created it; white institutions maintain it; and white society condones it.

George W. Bush let people die on rooftops in New Orleans because they were black and poor.

Every country has a part that is undeveloped.

The poor peasant here hives under conditions quite different from those of Russia. Though often terrible, they are not as appalling as they were there.

Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and makes some virtues impracticable and others extremely difficult.

By-and-large, these are families that are just waiting to get out of here. They are frustrated; I would be, too. I get frustrated at the cash register counter when the paper runs out.

Blacks commit murder eight times more per capita than any other group in our society. If I had put all of my police officers on Park Avenue and none in Harlem, thousands and thousands more blacks would've been killed during the eight years that I was mayor.

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!