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
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
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
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
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
Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn't commit.
—Eli Khamarov
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
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
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
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
The happiest hours of mankind are recorded on the blank pages of history.
—Thomas Carlyle
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
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
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
We forget that we ourselves are a part of history, that we are the product of growth and are condemned to perish if we lose the capacity for further growth and change. We are ourselves history and share the responsibility for world history and our position in it. But we gravely lack awareness of this responsibility.
—Herman Hesse