The Working Poor Quotes

#1. The difference between the very wealthy and the working poor has grown. We raise that minimum wage and we move forward with the vision of this president that we have, which is everyone pays their fair share.

Barbara Boxer

#2. Working at the Food Bank with my kids is an eye-opener. The face of hunger isn't the bum on the street drinking Sterno; it's the working poor. They don't look any different, they don't behave any differently, they're not really any less educated. They are incredibly less privileged, and that's it.

Mario Batali

#3. THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.

Jonathan Franzen

#4. Once again, the Republicans in the Senate have rejected an increase in the minimum wage. They support tax breaks for multi-millionaires, but they oppose helping the working poor to earn a decent income.

Mark Dayton

#5. Any way you slice it, increasing the minimum wage in Michigan ... is likely to make it more difficult for the working poor to find jobs ... those who most need the work will have a harder time finding it.

Paul Kersey

#6. I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they're not being written about much anymore. I'm very interested in people who are in a situation that needs a little puzzling out. The thing that gets me started on a story is a person in a tough situation.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

#7. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#8. Austerity is devastating these communities. The working poor, public sector workers, the disabled, and the vulnerable are the hardest hit by this bankrupt and ideologically driven policy.

Martin McGuinness

#9. These Americans are among the working poor with full-time jobs earning $5.15 an hour. Millions fall into this boat, even more when you consider that the poverty line has not been adequately adjusted to reflect the true level of poverty in this country.

Marcy Kaptur

#10. The simultaneous rise of both the working poor and non-working rich offers further evidence that earnings no longer correlate with effort.

Robert B. Reich

#11. Poor Fred - he's actually working on a typo, and somebody ought to tell him. Twice in the New Testament Jesus withered fig trees, Isaiah withered a fig tree, and there's another place in the Old Testament - I think it-s in Psalms - where a fig tree was withered. God hates figs, not fags!

Thom Hartmann

#12. The working-class folks and the poor, and those normal people living their lives out in the world without the glitter and the fanfare. There is a lot to learn from them.

Mark Ruffalo

#13. Have you been working on Sunday? Have you been buying or selling without necessity in the course of this holy day? Give to the poor some alms which will exceed the profit you have made.

John Vianney

#14. If you go to working class, and working poor areas of America, the food sources that are relegated to them are generally limited to unhealthy ones.

Anthony Bourdain

#15. When you love poor people THAT MUCH, when you love 'working people' THAT MUCH, that makes you the freest man/woman in the country.
- Cornel West in explaining that Obama is A fulfillment of MLK's dream not THE fulfillment of MLK's dream

Cornel West

#16. After some years of varied experience with the bodies of the rich and the poor a man finds little to distinguish between them, bulks them as one and bases his working judgements on other matters.

William Carlos Williams

#17. Before the arrival of the Credit Union, people who were from the poor background or a working class background couldn't borrow from banks.

John Hume

#18. Palestinians are a hard-working and an incredible community. They have done remarkably well outside their country. I have never met a poor Palestinian in the United States; every Palestinian I know is a college professor or a doctor.

William J. Clinton

#19. We are fighters and survivors. We are here. We are alive and breathing, living and loving, birthing and caring, working and earning. The sky is above us. The earth is below us. We can never be poor. ~ NanaAnna

Sister Souljah

#20. Until the Second World War, it was unthinkable for a married woman of the working or middle class to disgrace her husband by working after marriage, because her employment indicated that he was a poor provider

Sandra Scarr

#21. Art is the closest you can get to immortality, though it's a poor substitute - you're working for people not yet born - and people want it because it is brilliant. It ends up in museums anyway; the rich have to give it back to the people, it's their only option. There are no pockets in a shroud.

Damien Hirst

#22. The full extent of the problem of hunger is not obvious to most of us. We see the homeless, but there are a great number of working poor, struggling to survive, who don't have enough money to put adequate food on the table. We must find a solution to this ever-increasing problem - and quickly.

Scott Glenn

#23. I had watched for many years and seen how a few rich families held much of Argentina's wealth and power in their hands. So Peron and the government brought in an eight hour working day, sickness pay and fair wages to give poor workers a fair go .

Evita Peron

#24. Even when you have skilled, motivated, hard-working people, the wrong team structure can undercut their efforts instead of catapulting them to success. A poor team structure can increase development time, reduce quality, damage morale, increase turnover, and ultimately lead to project cancellation.

Steve McConnell

#25. I know too much from personal observation from how the poor and working classes live to be satisfied with a system which makes their lives one unceasing round of toil, deprivation and anxiety.

Vida Goldstein

#26. The rich were getting richer, the poor were getting poorer, small farmers were being squeezed out, workingmen were working twelve hours a day for a bare living; profits were for the rich, the law was for the rich, the cops were for the rich;

John Dos Passos

#27. The sixties?All right if you happened to have money. All right if you happened to know the right people. All right if you happened to live in London. But if you were poor, working class and lived anywhere else, then forget it. The sixties never happened.

C.J. Stone

#28. I grew up on what everybody called a plantation - but believe me, it wasn't a plantation. It was just an old farm. I grew up with a lot of black people working in the fields, and it was during the Depression between 1930 and the war, so we were all poor - black and white.

Sam Phillips

#29. Working-class and poor women are also living outside of marriage, at even higher rates than their more privileged peers. When it comes to unmarried women and money, the unprecedented economic opportunity enjoyed by a few is a small fraction of a far more complicated story.

Rebecca Traister

#30. We [Americans] have to get beyond the greed-run-amok. We have to get beyond indifference to the poor and working people. We have to get beyond polarized politics.

Cornel West

#31. Poor people and working people have not been the focus of the Obama administration. That for me is not just a disappointment but a kind of betrayal.

Cornel West

#32. The most important assets we have are our bodies and our energy which can be put to good use as resources in political activism for poor and working people.

Cornel West

#33. Mine has been a concern for the people, a concern to maintain stability, a concern to get people working together racially, ethnically, rich and poor - all segments of the city.

Walter Washington

#34. Martin King was fundamentally committed to the least of these [poor, working people]. Of course, he was a Christian soldier for justice from the 25th chapter of Matthew.

Cornel West

#35. We need to put strong Democratic pressure on President Obama in the name of poor and working people.

Cornel West

#36. Yes, in socialism the rich will be poorer - but the poor will also be poorer. People will lose interest in really working hard and creating jobs.

Thomas Peterffy

#37. An old man in poor health, like my rival, could not be expected to be so impressively feeble as a young actor in the prime of life. You see, he really had paralysis, and working within this definite limitation, he couldn't be so jolly paralytic as I was.

Anonymous

#38. Teachers are everything. I mean, you're a poor kid from the ghetto, your parents are busy working 24/7, working like a Mexican.

John Leguizamo

#39. My government is working for the common man. Our priority is the poor of the country. We want good governance through a dynamic and seamless government.

Narendra Modi

#40. I came from a poor family, so working and going to school at the same time was natural. It taught me multi-tasking, although we didn't call it that back then. I learned I could never be idle, I need to be doing many things at once.

Alan Dershowitz

#41. Wealthy people are often criticized for being obsessed with money, but the truth is, it's the poor, working, and middle class that spend the most time thinking about it.

Steve Siebold

#42. I represent poor people, I represent working people. I represent senior citizens. I represent family businesses. I represent people who don't have the wherewithal to hire overpriced Washington lobbyists and lawyers. I want to send the powers back to the states and the people.

Paul Broun

#43. Do the elected officials in Washington stand with ordinary Americans - working families, children, the elderly, the poor - or will the extraordinary power of billionaire campaign contributors and Big Money prevail? The American people, by the millions, must send Congress the answer to that question.

Bernie Sanders

#44. Charities are now working to give people in poor countries access to the Internet. But shouldn't we spend that money on providing health clinics and safe water? Aren't these things more relevant? I have no intention of downplaying the importance of the Internet, but its impact has been exaggerated.

Ha-Joon Chang

#45. The more cash-rich working Americans are, the more time-poor they feel,

Anonymous

#46. It is not God but the Devil who is in charge of the international situation and those who are working for God in it are poor servants if all they do is worship God and neglect their duty to cincumvent the Devil.

Ramsay MacDonald

#47. The problem is not just affirmative action, though. The problem is poor people, working people and their children, and affirmative action for the most part doesn't even apply to them.

Cornel West

#48. We need leadership in this country, which will improve the lives of working families, the children, the elderly, the sick and the poor. We need leadership which brings our people together and makes us stronger.

Bernie Sanders

#49. There is a lot of gender segregation. You still have many poor women who work in women-only jobs. In the family, in most cases, only women have the double job of working outside the home and taking care of the family.

Alix Kates Shulman

#50. How lame an anti-climax! If the working-class has remained "poor," only "less poor" in proportion as it produces for the wealthy class "an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power," then it has remained relatively just as poor.

Karl Marx

#51. The poor are too busy working to need justice.

Ted Danson

#52. Companies like Husk Power Systems are working to impact positively not only the environment, but to ensure that someday everyone, including the poorest of the poor in rural India, will have access to clean and affordable electricity.

Jacqueline Novogratz

#53. In the same way, people who sleep when they should be working are testing God. Because God promised to take care of them, they assume that God will find a way. But in Proverbs, God told them to work: "Lazy hands make a man poor, but diligent hands bring wealth" (Proverbs 10:4).

Martin Luther

#54. We want to begin in working-class neighborhoods. We want to test the concept there, because our idea is that fair trade should not just be for the elites, but for everyone, for the majority, for the poor people. Quality food for poor people. Why just quality for the rich? And at an equal price

Victor Suarez Melendez

#55. My father was a Presbyterian minister, working among the poor in West Virginia. He had taken what amounted to a vow of poverty when he accepted that call and so we never had much money.

James Green Somerville

#56. I had no idea that I would ever get involved with something like lending money to poor people, given the circumstances in which I was working in Bangladesh.

Muhammad Yunus

#57. Remember that the poor are people with names," writes Bryant Myers, author of Walking with the Poor. "[They are] people with whom and among whom God has been working before we even knew they were there.

Mike Yankoski

#58. But it was impossible to make any impression upon the middling people and the working labouring poor. Their fears were predominant over all their passions, and they threw away their money in a most distracted manner upon those whimsies.

Daniel Defoe

#59. We must begin to create a revolutionary, multiracial women's movement that seriously addresses the main issues affecting poor and working-class women.

Angela Y. Davis

#60. The Poor Peasants' Committees are necessary to fight the kulaks, the rich, the exploiters, who shackle the working peasants.

Vladimir Lenin

#61. The situation that has not its duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy ideal; work it out therefrom, and, working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the ideal is in thyself.

Thomas Carlyle

#62. I thought there might be some grand design I did not understand, but the government's policy clearly was not working, because India was still poor. I was determined to learn more, so I became interested in economics. This book is another unintended consequence of the government's policies.

Raghuram G. Rajan

#63. I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor.

Sue Townsend

#64. We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#65. In 1918, a Chinese immigrant working in a Los Angeles noodle factory invented the fortune cookie. He did so believing that a cookie with a positive message in it would raise the spirits of the city's poor.

James Frey

#66. The truth about it is, whether we is rich or poor or somethin in between, this earth ain't no final restin place. So in a way, we is all homeless--just working our way toward home.

Denver Moore

#67. Most poor people earn more than minimum wage when they are working; their problem is not low wages. The problem comes when they are not working.

Joseph Stiglitz