“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
“Classification and criminalization work by including poor and working-class people in systems that limit their rights and deny their basic human needs. The digital poorhouse doesn’t just exclude, it sweeps millions of people into a system of control that compromises their humanity and their self determination.”
Source: Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
“… religious sentiment was opposed to [print], as it was considered that it was sacrilegious to print their holy book, the Koran. The printed sheets might be put to improper use or stomped upon or thrown in the rubbish heap.”
Source: Discovery of India
“And since she wanted to be good, she's always been careful not to care too much about money. Now she wondered if all those Disney movies were merely propaganda to keep poor people content with their lot. 'We may be poor, but we're the salt of the earth, we know what really matters. The rich are perverted by their hideous wealth - why, look at that Cruella de Vil!' But good or evil, even single dollar was power. Power to hire a lawyer, power to control how she spent her time, power to change her appearance, power to command respect. Power to be who she wanted to be.”
Source: Margo's Got Money Troubles
“In poverty you may still preserve the nobility of your inborn feelings, but in destitution no one ever does.”
Source: Crime and Punishment
“The greatest revolutions begin in whispers of possibility.”