“After removing a debilitating number of jobs and the funding to ensure quality schools, after instituting laws that disrupt families' possibility to thrive, welfare laws beginning in the 1970s meant that women often lost benefits needed to feed their children if they had a man present in the home, even if, between the two of them, they still subsisted on poverty wages. Our mothers and fathers and daughters and sons were criminalized for choices made out of absolute desperation and lack of any other real options.”
Source: When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
“She would rather live her own life of mah-jongg games, while pretending all those starving in the streets are invisible.”
Source: The Samurai's Garden
“Now, my new goal is to earn enough to bring us from lower middle class to the middle class. That is enough for me for this lifetime.”
Source: Freshly Laidoff
“To know the world in its fullness is to pay homage to the mystery of existence itself.”
Source: The Polymath’s Path: Mastery Beyond Limits
“A comfortable old age without health is poverty.”
“Emigration and war are two sides of a single coin. It has been rightly said that the greatest producer of migrants is war - war in one guise or another, since climate change and poverty are, essentially, the sick fruit of a blind war that man himself has declared - against a fairer distribution of resources, against nature, against his own planet.”
Source: Hope: The Autobiography
“Today in my view the most serious problem we face as a nation is the grotesque and growing level of wealth and income inequality. This is a profound moral issue, it is an economic issue, and it is a political issue.”
“Poverty in America is not invisible. We see it, and then we look away.”
Source: Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
“When poor and working people in the United States become a politically viable force, relief institutions and their technologies of control shift to better facilitate cultural denial and to rationalize a brutal return to subserviency. Relief institutions are machines for undermining the collective power of poor and working-class people, and for producing in difference in everyone else.”
Source: Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
“[Denial] contorts our physical geography, as we build infrastructure—suburbs, highways, private schools, and prisons—that allow the professional middle-class to actively avoid sharing the lives of poor and working-class people.”
Source: Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor