Housing Quotes - page 10
Sadly, Perkins was right that the door might not open to other women for a "long, long time." Twenty years passed before... Dwight Eisenhower, appointed... Oveta Culp Hobby... as secretary of health, education and welfare... Forty-two years passed before President Gerald Ford appointed Carla Hills as secretary of housing and urban development... Sixty years later President Bill Clinton appointed three women and eleven men to his cabinet.
Frances Perkins
Just look at the scores of thousands of housing tracts in this country, where only parents and children live. Think of the impact on these children who will grow up without close proximity to grandparents. There are certain things that a grandmammy or a granddaddy can do for a child that no one else can. It's sort of like Stardust - the relationship between grandparents and children. The lack of this for many children has to have a negative impact on society. The edges of these children are a little sharper for the lack of it. ... I tell young people to go to the oldest members of their family and get as much oral history as possible. Many grandparents carry three or four generations of history in their heads but don't talk about it because they have been ignored. And when the young person starts doing this, the old are warmed to the cockles of their souls and will tell a grandchild everything they can muster.
Alex Haley
You and I in America are faced not with a segregationist conspiracy, we're faced with a government conspiracy. Everyone who's filibustering is a senator-that's the government. Everyone who's finagling in Washington, D.C., is a congressman-that's the government. You don't have anybody putting blocks in your path but people who are a part of the government. The same government that you go abroad to fight for and die for is the government that is in a conspiracy to deprive you of your voting rights, deprive you of your economic opportunities, deprive you of decent housing, deprive you of decent education. You don't need to go to the employer alone, it is the government itself, the government of America, that is responsible for the oppression and exploitation and degradation of black people in this country. And you should drop it in their lap. This government has failed the Negro. This so-called democracy has failed the Negro. And all these white liberals have definitely failed the Negro.
Malcolm X
They want to bring in one million Mexicans from Mexico. We've already got close to a million people here illegally. And how are they being treated? They are paying three hundred dollars each to come over the border. They are being put in housing where you have thirty or forty people in a room without any kind of a sanitary facility.
Dolores Huerta
All over the country today, La Raza is in motion. A spirit of awakening runs through the big city barrios, small towns, colleges and universities, the countryside. Our people are refusing to be filled with shame any longer, they are refusing to be oppressed, they are demanding liberation and a decent life...They are working on problems like working conditions and pay, education, welfare rights, housing, child care, police brutality. They are forming groups of women with names like Las Chicanas and Las Adelitas.
Elizabeth Martinez
At the same time in the developed world, because of its worship at the altar of market forces, commercialization is reaching a point where more and more people are being made unemployed. Competition forces companies to cut their expenditure on everything, beginning with people. In every developed country of the world there is growing unemployment, growing crime, and a declining standard of living - less housing, more and more homeless people, and more poverty in the midst of plenty.
Benjamin Creme
All over the country, particularly in our large urban areas, old people do go in fear and trembling as never before during either the lifetime of their parents or grandparents...we have been too ready to listen to those who believe that rising crime is due to things like higher unemployment, poor housing, poor pay. While it has always been part of Conservative policy to raise the standard of living of our people we must recognise that in the 1930's there were far more people out of work, far less prosperity and worse housing-but much less crime than now...Rising crime is not due to "society”-but to the steady undermining of personal responsibility and self-discipline-all things which are taught within the family.
Margaret Thatcher
Negroes are almost entirely a working people.... Our needs are identical with labor's needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor's demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature, spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.
Martin Luther King Jr.
For the Negro, therefore, intelligent guides of family planning are a profoundly important ingredient in his quest for security and a decent life. There are mountainous obstacles still separating Negroes from a normal existence. Yet one element in stabilizing his life would be an understanding of and easy access to the means to develop a family related in size to his community environment and to the income potential he can command. This is not to suggest that the Negro will solve all his problems through Planned Parenthood. His problems are far more complex, encompassing economic security, education, freedom from discrimination, decent housing and access to culture. Yet if family planning is sensible it can facilitate or at least not be an obstacle to the solution of the many profound problems that plague him.
Martin Luther King Jr.
The distribution of this great wealth-the way in which it is apportioned to profits, wages, and professional salaries, education, health, continuing economic development, social security, recreation, housing, communications is extremely important...I propose that economic justice be maintained or improved as part of the agenda of the future.
Luis Muñoz Marín
Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls where other citizens help to carry them. Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children. But whatever the cause, our joint Federal-local effort must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists--in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks or in migrant worker camps, on Indian Reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas.
Lyndon B. Johnson
