11 quotes
It is an intolerable irony that societies that are anything but socialist should thus define what socialism is in the eyes of so many. It is an irony that has to be undone.
Socialism: Past and Future (1989)
Life is lived in common, but not in community.
The Other America (1962)
Socialism, I want to propose, is the hope for human freedom and justice under the unprecedented conditions of life that humanity will face in the twenty-first century.
Socialism: Past and Future (1989)
If there is technological advance without social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery, in impoverishment.
The Other America (1962)
The rise of Communist states - dictatorship with centrally planned, nationalized economies - did more to distort and confuse the meaning of socialism than any other event in history.
Socialism: Past and Future (1989)
Clothes make the poor invisible.... America has the best-dressed poverty the world has ever known.
The Other America (1962)
Beauty can be mask for ugliness.
The Other America (1962)
The laws against color can be removed, but that will leave the poverty that is the historic and institutionalized consequence of color. As long as this is the case, being born Negro will continue to be the most profound disability that the United States imposes upon a citizen.
The Other America (1962)
Negro poverty is unique is every way. It grows out of a long American history, and it expresses itself in a subculture that is buit up on an interlocking base of economic and racial injustice. It is a fact imposed from without, from white America.
The Other America (1962)
Our affluent society contains those of talent and insight who are driven to prefer poverty, to choose it, rather than to submit to the desolation of an empty abundance. It is a strange part of the other America that one finds in the intellectual slums.
The Other America (1962)
The means are at hand to fulfill the age-old dream: poverty can now be abolished. How long shall we ignore this underdeveloped nation in our midst? How long shall we look the other way while our fellow human beings suffer? How long?
The Other America (1962)