Poverty made me feel weak, as if I were coming down with an awful, debilitating, communicable disease — the disease of being without money. Instead of going to the hospital, you went to the poor farm. The difference was, you never got well at the poor farm. —Faith Sullivan More about this quote Tags: money poverty disease Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
When a poor man knocks at your door and says, "I'm hungry," and your first thought is Why can't you get a job?, you've invaded his privacy. Why would you need to know why he can't get a job? He didn't come to discuss his inabilities or bad habits; he came to discuss his hunger. If you want to do something about it, feed him. —Rabbi Manis Friedman More about this quote Tags: hunger privacy poverty habit job ability Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us. —Lionel Trilling More about this quote Tags: poverty equality liberal progressives Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
The last thing people want to see outside the marquee of Les Misérables, after they leave their $250 seats, is the real misérables, the children on the sidewalk. —Jonathan Kozol More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
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 More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. —Zora Neale Hurston More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn't commit. —Eli Khamarov More about this quote Tags: poverty crime punishment Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
The poor have been sent to the front lines of a federal-budget deficit-reduction war that few other groups were drafted to fight. —Marian Wright Edelman More about this quote Tags: politics poverty budget Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
How come it's a "subsidy" when Pan American Airlines asks the government for a hundred million dollars to keep flying, but when people ask for considerably less to keep going, it is a federal handout? —Russell Baker More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
There's a group of Americans who are fully employed. They aren't very well paid or they're not paid at all. They're called mothers, and I've never heard of a mother who wasn't a working mother. And that includes the mothers on welfare. —Theresa Funiciello More about this quote Tags: work USA mothers welfare Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Being a mother is a noble status, right? Right. So why does it change when you put "unwed" or "welfare" in front of it? —Florynce Kennedy More about this quote Tags: nobility marriage motherhood welfare Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
The happiest hours of mankind are recorded on the blank pages of history. —Thomas Carlyle More about this quote Tags: history memory happiness Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
K is for "Kenghis Khan." He was a very nice person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere. —Harlan Ellison More about this quote Tags: history memory niceness Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
It is up to us; there is no one left to blame. Neither the system, nor our leaders, nor our parents. We can't go out and hang the first amoeba. —Rebecca McClen Novick More about this quote Tags: parents responsibility blame Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
What is a minority? The chosen heroes of this earth have been in a minority. There is not a social, political, or religious privilege that you enjoy today that was not bought for you by the blood and tears and patient suffering of the minority. It is the minority that have stood in the vanguard of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world. —John B. Gough More about this quote Tags: history privilege morality suffering nobility heroes conflict minority Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email