Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Matthew Desmond

Quote by Matthew Desmond

Work

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Matthew Desmond

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Matthew Desmond. more

You May Also Like

“Do not avert your eyes. It is important that you see this. It is important that you feel this.”

ArtImportantWarCountryArtistHumanityPoliticsNatureConsciousnessPovertyViolenceAwarenessMediaPerspectiveDiseasePerceptionNewsHumanConsciousTransformationHungerCorruptionAwakeningPerceiveAcknowledgeGlobal WarmingGenocideAnimalsEyesPresentFloodExtinctionHomelessnessUnderstandKnowNationKamandKojouriRecogniseFeelKamand KojouriStarvationFamineCorruptSeeAwakenLookTransformAwareRealizeHumannessDeforestationAvertRecognizeNoticeTranscendGazeComprehendRealiseAtrocityStareGraspLook Away
Author:Kamand Kojouri
Create image

“External explanations of black-white differences — discrimination or poverty, for example—seem to many to be more amenable to public policy than internal explanations such as culture. Those with this point of view tend to resist cultural explanations but there is yet another reason why some resist understanding the counterproductive effects of an anachronistic culture: Alternative explanations of economic and social lags provide a more satisfying ability to blame all such lags on the sins of others, such as racism or discrimination. Equally important, such external explanations require no painful internal changes in the black population but leave all changes to whites, who are seen as needing to be harangued, threatened, or otherwise forced to change. In short, prevailing explanations provide an alibi for those who lag—and an alibi is for many an enormously valuable asset that they are unlikely to give up easily.”

PovertyRacismDiscrimination
Book:Black Rednecks and White Liberals
Create image

“For most Americans of the eighteenth century, it was assumed impossible for a servant to shed his lowly origins; the meaner sort, as one newspaper insisted, could never “wash out the stain of servility.” There were fears that the meaner sort were treading too close on the heels of those above them.”

AmericaClassPovertyWhite Trash
Book:White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
Create image

“Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life. Do you consider all this desirable? No, I don't. But it may be that the psychological adjustment which the working class are visibly making is the best they could make in the circumstances. They have neither turned revolutionary nor lost their self-respect; merely they have kept their tempers and settled down to make the best of things on a fish-and-chip standard. The alternative would be God knows what continued agonies of despair; or it might be attempted insurrections which, in a strongly governed country like England, could only lead to futile massacres and a regime of savage repression.”

PovertyLuxuries
Book:The Road to Wigan Pier
Create image

“It is quite wrong to assume that poor people are generally unwilling to change; but the proposed change must stand in some organic relationship to what they are doing already, and they are rightly suspicious of, and resistant to, radical changes proposed by town-based and office-bound innovators who approach them in the spirit of: "You just get out of my way and I shall show you how useless you are and how splendidly the job can be done with a lot of foreign money and outlandish equipment.”

PovertyEconomics
Book:Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
Create image

“To cause pain was a disease. As a child I imagined tiny, almost invisible animals that arrived in the neighborhood at night, they came from the ponds, from the abandoned train cars beyond the embankment, from the stinking grasses called fetienti, from the frogs, the salamanders, the flies, the rocks, the dust, and entered the water and the food and the air, making our mothers, our grandmothers as angry as starving dogs.”

PovertyViolence
Book:My Brilliant Friend
Create image