Quotes from Michael Harrington

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

It takes a certain level of aspiration before one can take advantage of opportunities that are clearly offered.

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 the society.

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

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.

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.

Our affluent society contains those of talent and insight who are driven to prefer poverty, to choose it, rather than submit to the desolation of an empty abundance.

Managers receiving hundreds of thousands a year—and setting their compensation for themselves—are not being paid wages, they are appropriating surplus value in the guise of wages.

most people since the dawn of human time have been simply programmed by their birth to a short and brutish life that is not shaped by them or anyone else.

Socialism is still beginning, a task to be accomplished, not a destiny to be awaited.