68 Quotes

“[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,' [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. 'They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that in the course of organization leaders have found each other, gotten all involved in each others' social lives, and have ended up talking to nobody but each other. They have not found their followers. Everything tends to degenerate into ineffective cliques, as a natural course. There is no normal public life. Just the mechanics of people learning what s going on is so difficult. It all makes the simplest social gain extra hard for these people.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“De onmacht die je voelt wanneer je een pen vasthoudt in de hand waarmee je normaal gesproken niet schrijft, in mijn geval mijn linkerhand; vergelijkbaar met de onmacht die je kunt voelen in sociale situaties, ruzies voorop. Je bent juist uitgerust, fysiek gezien klopt de situatie, maar hoe beweeg je je voort, hoe druk je je uit zonder te gaan trillen?”
― Lieke Marsman, Het tegenovergestelde van een mens

“The United States granted asylum to exactly eight of 24,559 Haitian refugees applying for political asylum during that period [1981]... only 20 percent of those polled [in the US] said immigration should be easier for Haitians, while 55 percent said it should be more difficult. After a decade during which less than 0.5 percent of Haitian applicants were granted asylum, one wonders how much more difficult it could be.”
― Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor