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Neighborhood Quotes

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Neighborhood Quotes

“The rules have changed as information and technology evolve, but it's essential that people stay in the streets, stay visible in their communities, on the news, on the Internet, and in this crucial public discussion. There are a million people just like you (or me), sharing the same doubts, fears, and insecurities that keep us from speaking out. Finding each other in our neighborhoods, online, in the streets - this is what keeps us from believing we're alone, from giving in to hopelessness.”

“In Cuba the elections for the powers of the State comes from the people, first it comes from meetings of the citizens at the base. In Cuba we call them blocks, the divisions of a city that is the term we use. Several blocks of neighborhoods that live in the same area gather in assemblies that are stipulated by law. In those assemblies the people choose freely among themselves who will represent them. The criteria takes into account the candidates characteristics, including if they are hardworking, If they are good people, if they have a clean past, and money has no bearing on who is nominated.”

“We could do some household and neighborhood or town wind energy. But even this will run up eventually against the problem of needing an underlying fossil fuel economy to fabricate the hardware. Same with photovoltaic (solar) energy. We're going to be disappointed by what these things can do for us.”

“Each week I pack my bag and travel the country, I go to people who write me and tell me their problems. I appear whether at their house or at their job site or some neighborhood gathering. I come there and listen to their story and I get hands on as I say. I don t give advice, I give people hope, I build their self-esteem, I motivate 'em. I inspire them because that's what I do.”

“Let Girls Learn issue has always been personal for me. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago where most folks, including my parents, didn't have college degrees. But with a lot of hard work - and a lot of financial aid - I had the chance to attend Princeton and Harvard Law School, and that gave me the confidence to pursue my ambitions.”

“For too many of us, it's become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods or on college campuses, or places of worship or especially our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions. And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it's true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.”

“I think that one of the greatest challenges we have today is around education. One of the things that is dividing us more and more is whether you have good prospects or you don't. Do you live a neighborhood where the schools are good? If you don't, your kids may not read until the time they're in third grade. Do you at least have access to a community college that will give you job training skills so that if you don't go for four years you will at least come out with a decent job and a decent wage. Too many people don't have that opportunity.”

“Build. Transform. Love. These are words I use all the time as we speak about community building and even real estate development because these are the kind of communities, like, we want to show you don't have to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one. And when people think about living in a neighborhood, they are not thinking about fight - the community of their dreams, they are not fighting in it, they are not struggling in it. It's not, "Oh, I gotta put on my armor." All the time. I don't want to live like that. I don't.”

“Housing is where it all begins. Where you live determines everything from where you shop for food, to how safe your neighborhood is, to your kids' school, to whether you're exposed to toxic chemicals on a daily basis. And as a New Yorker, I found it impossible not to notice and be bothered by the huge number of homeless people in the city, as well as by the segregation and gentrification that's all around you.”

“People need to get involved in their neighborhood groups and the many housing reform groups that are out there. We need to hold our elected officials accountable and push them to create legislation that protects tenants and keeps people in their homes. Our governments - local, state and federal - also need to allocate resources to enforce the fair housing laws that are already on the books.”

“As I set out to begin photographing Shanghai, I encountered the insider/outsider phenomena in the most personal of ways. You would walk into an old neighborhood in the center of city, and people would begin to point at you. People would begin to talk about you, spreading the word about the outsider who has wandered into their midst, look at him, he's got a camera, what's he doing, is this allowed, is this OK, how should be respond to him.”

“After I got out of law school and worked in a big law firm, I thought, there are so many kids like me, in my neighborhood, that could be here if they had more support from their families, better financial aid. But the gap is so wide once you miss that opportunity. So I was always interested in figuring out, How do you bridge that? I felt, as a lawyer, when I was mentoring and working with kids, that I gained a level of groundedness that I just couldn't get sitting on the forty-seventh floor of a fancy firm.”

“Washington flourished but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, but for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists. An education system flushed with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge. We've defended other nation's borders while refusing to defend our own.”

“The American dream is about achieving happiness. When you become a fire fighter, a police officer or a teacher or a nurse, you know you're not going to become a billionaire. And what my parents achieved working as a bartender and a maid at a hotel after arriving here with nothing, no education, no money. The first words my dad learned in English where I'm looking for a job.You know what my parents achieved? They owned a home in a safe and stable neighborhood. They retired with dignity and they left all four of their children better off than themselves.”

“You can be horrified by the state of the prisons, the misery in certain neighborhoods of its cities, or their level of poverty. Anti-Americanism, by which I mean a hatred for America as such-its transformation into a metaphysical category, which incarnates all the evil in the world-is one of fascism's favorite themes. Look at writer and political theorist Charles Maurras in France. The philosopher Martin Heidegger in Germany. The radical Islamists of today!”

“People call what we do "stretch music." This is our style, and one of the newer, in vogue ways of playing creative, improvised music. It really grew out of me trying to address something that I saw in my everyday life in my neighborhood - trying to develop that and refine that and excavate exactly what that was in a way that, when I communicated it, it was palpable and easily read. That started really early. Why it started was from something that I was really angry about.”

“Epidemic obesity is an enormous problem. It's a pendulum that's swung too far. We have to swing it back. So it should come as no surprise that solution must be built from the ground up on the banks of this flooding river and it must be raised to a height higher than flood waters. Now what does that look like? It looks like policies and programs that cultivate healthy levels of physical activity, healthy dietary patterns in homes, in schools, in supermarkets, in neighborhoods, in clinics, in churches, in workplaces, throughout our society, every place we can reach people.”

“I worry about the kids who have too much. As a parent living in a so-called good neighborhood with children who went to private high school, I found myself spending much time in parent groups worrying about alcohol, unsupervised parties, and parents not being parents. We've got to send messages to our kids about what is important.”

“If you're going to compare a middle-income black kid with a middle- income white kid, and, say, you control for family background, family education, and family income, and if this middle-income black kid doesn't score as well as the white kid on the test, then I say, look, you haven't taken into consideration the cumulative effect of living in a segregated neighborhood and going to a de facto segregated school. You're denying a position at Harvard or some other place to a kid that really could make it. That's why I support affirmative action that's based on both class and race.”

“For an ordinary citizen, what is the common interaction you have with a police officer? When they pull you over for speeding, or when they write you a ticket for parking. The rest of the time is patrolling minority neighborhoods like an occupying army. It's suppression of blacks, and it's revenue enhancement. Surveillance is a Band-Aid. That's like saying, "Let's surveil the SS." No! Let's get rid of the SS!”

“The War on Drugs is a war on people, but particularly it's been a war on low-income people and a war on minorities. We know in the United States of America there is no difference in drug use between black, white and Latinos. But if you're Latino in the United States of America, you're about twice as likely to be arrested for drug use than if you're white. If you're black, you are about four times as likely to be arrested if you're African American than if you are white. This drug war has done so much to destroy, undermine, sabotage families, communities, neighborhoods, cities.”

“Americans have a hard time writing moms. I'll get a script and everything's really great and well-drawn, but the mom is like stock footage, they go and get that out. They plug it in, this idea of "mother." You could lift moms out of any script, no matter what the culture, what the neighborhood, what the economic status, and you could switch them around, and they'd be the same person. I think it's because most people don't really have a human idea, a specific life that they attach to who their mother was. Their mother was there for them, so it either gets deified, or the opposite.”