Michael Harrington - The Other America (1962)

9 Sourced Quotes

View all Michael Harrington Quotes
That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.

Michael Harrington
The other America, the America of poverty, is hidden today in a way that it never was before. Its millions are socially invisible to the rest of us.... The very development of American society is creating a new kind of blindness about poverty. The poor are increasingly slipping out of the very experience and consciousness of the nation.

Michael Harrington
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.

Michael Harrington
For the urban poor the police are those who arrest you. In almost any slum there is a vast conspiracy against the forces of law and order.

Michael Harrington
If there is technological advance without social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery, in impoverishment.

Michael Harrington
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.

Michael Harrington
People who are much too sensitive to demand of cripples that they run races ask of the poor that they get up and act just like everyone else in society.

Michael Harrington
The American economy, the American society, the American unconscious are all racist.

Michael Harrington
Clothes make the poor invisible.... America has the best-dressed poverty the world has ever known.

Michael Harrington