Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Bayard Rustin

Quote by Bayard Rustin

“There must be a diversion of federal funds simultaneously to schools, housing, jobs, and health. We must eradicate our worst poverty--not the poverty in Harlem or Watts, but the poverty in men's imaginations. The middle classes who think that string, Scotch tape, and spit will get us out of our present dilemma must be convinced otherwise. Even compensatory education, isolated from adequate housing, decent living conditions, and good neighborhoods, is useless. What is needed is something more far-reaching, more imaginative. We must begin by accepting the idea of a national plan to eradicate the ghetto. We must have national priorities and we must adjust the scale of our thinking to the scale of the problem.”

Quote by Bayard Rustin

Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
Create image

Work

Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Bayard Rustin
Bayard Rustin

Bayard Rustin was a prominent African American civil rights activist who played a significant role in the American civil rights movement. He was a strategist and advisor to many civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. Rustin was a key figure in the organization of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, one of the largest political protests in U.S. history. He was also a leader in the gay rights movement and advocated for nonviolent protest and civil disobedience. more

You May Also Like

“Man is the shepherd of Being. Man loses nothing in this "less"; rather, he gains in that he attains the truth of Being. He gains the essential poverty of the shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called by Being itself into the preservation of Being's truth. The call comes as the throw from which the thrownness of Da-sein derives. In his essential unfolding within the history of Being, man is the being whose Being as ek-sistence consists in his dwelling in the nearness of Being. Man is the neighbor of Being.”

PovertyDignityNeighborBeingShepherdDa SeinEk SistenceThrownness
Book:Basic Writings
Create image

“Material progress does not merely fail to relieve poverty, it actually produces it. This association of progress with poverty is the great enigma of our times. It is the riddle that the sphinx of fate puts to our civilization. And which NOT to answer is to be destroyed.”

PovertyIncome InequalityDistribution Of Wealth
Book:Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry in the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth... The Remedy
Create image

“With no small amount of trepidation, we walked alone past a colony of black-faced monkeys we’d been told were extremely dangerous. We avoided eye contact and certainly didn’t take pictures. And dearly wished our old Sherpa bag-carrying matey was nearby. We visited Gandhi’s tomb. We saw saris being printed and hand-knotted carpets being fabricated and negotiated a decent price for a small hand-crafted rug of Mughal design that, as long as we keep the certificate of authenticity safe, should appreciated in value. We witnessed poverty beyond poverty, with ‘untouchables’ so poor that they are actually outside the caste system, and who can’t even afford to live in the unsanitary slums described as 'unfit for human habitation.”

PovertyIndiaMonkeysGandhiSlumsCaste SystemMughals Of IndiaMughal
Book:Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe
Create image