Quotes About Ghettos

There was nothing rational about a wall, whether it encircled Berlin, San Quentin or the ghettos of Warsaw. A wall was a symbol, fortified as much by the idea behind it as by bricks and guns.

For the elite, living comfortably in their gilded ghettos, the world must indeed seem a better place.

The existence of black ghettos is a visible reminder of our inequalities and history, a reminder whose implications are so uncomfortable that we find ways to avoid them.

We don't hesitate to acknowledge that Jews in Eastern Europe were forced to live in ghettos where opportunity was limited and leaving was difficult or impossible. Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as the inner city, yet everyone knows what we mean. (When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don't characterize those whites as inner city families.)

What excites me about America is its social mobility, people continually rising from the bottom to the top and altering the culture in the process. On another level, however, we remain a nation that lives in social ghettos. Celebrities generally congregate around other celebrities; academics and intellectuals are cloistered in their worlds; people like to associate with those of their kind. If we leave these narrow worlds, it is usually as an observer of another way of life.

In the ghettos, as in the extermination camps to which they were the antechamber, the résistants embarked on a race against death. To struggle and resist was the only lucid choice, but this most often meant for the fighters no more than choosing the time and manner of their death. Beyond the immediate outcome of the struggle, which most often was inevitable, their combat was for history, for memory

We've only been living in these ghettos for seventy-five years or so, but the other three hundred years -- I think this is worth writing about. I think we've made tremendous sacrifices, we've shown tremendous strength. In the ghetto you see a lot of frustration; you see very little strength.

Nevertheless, the more odious restrictions – such as being confined at night to ghettos, or even being expelled from a nation – were placed upon them by the state, not the Roman Catholic Church.

One consequence of racism and segregation is that many American whites know little or nothing about the daily lives of African Americans. Black America's least-understood communities are those poor, hyper-segregated places we once called ghettos. These neighborhoods are not far away, but they might as well be on the moon.

In an essay for the Saturday Review, a magazine that appealed to economically comfortable, upper-middlebrow readers, King wrote: "The flames of Watts illuminated more than the western sky; they cast light on the imperfections in the civil rights movement and the tragic shallowness of white racial policy in the explosive ghettos.

A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this, yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly, and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.

Many of the Jewish survey respondents, however, first became aware of the Holocaust when they themselves became caught up in it and had not known about it before they were deported to the concentration camps and ghettos in eastern Europe.

The Scriptures say that we should not fear those things which can destroy the body, but we are to fear that which can destroy the soul (Matt. 10:28). While the ghettos may have their share of violence and crime, the suburbs are the home of the more subtle demonic forces—numbness, complacency, comfort—and it is these that can eat away at our souls.

While the ghettos may have their share of violence and crime, the posh suburbs are home to more subtle demonic forces--numbness, complacency and comfort. These are the powers that can eat away at our souls.

Disaffection, alienation and conspiracy theories are commonplace among European Muslims, but dangerous Islamist radicalism and the Islamic State's 'foreign fighter' recruitment successes tend to be specific to certain European towns, districts and ghettos.

The majority of them simply melted into the host country's underbelly. The low-income areas? If that's what you want to call them. What better place to hide than among that part of society that no one else even wants to acknowledge. How else could so many outbreaks have started in so many First World ghettos?

The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast.

The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast.

A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this, yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly, and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.

My own grandparents came to the United States as immigrants in 1912, and they lived for some years in Italian ghettos in New York. Most immigrant groups start in ghettos somewhere, and many of them never get out.

What kind of people will these ghettos of Palestinians produce? What form of morality, national consciousness and hope will people be left with after so many years of stifling occupation and a sense of hopelessness?

Jew hatred was overwhelmingly religious in nature and began to wane only in the age of enlightened absolutism in Western and Central Europe. Still, Gentiles and Jews had extremely limited contact in society. Jews had to live in ghettos in some cities and were entirely forbidden from even entering certain others.

Since 2002, there has been a wave of attacks against Jewish 'persons or property' in France, a great many of them committed by young men living outside Paris, in the vast ghettos called les banlieues.

I would love to see no more ghettos but the things is, there's no diplomacy in the ghetto. They want to tell you something, they tell you straight!