56 quotes found
“No one asks poor people if they want war. Nor had anyone asked these poor people if they wanted to die of thirst and exposure on the coastal sea, or if they wanted to be robbed and raped by their o...”
“Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.”
“The rich are all alike, to revise Tolstoys famous words, but the poor are poor in their own particular ways. Any reasonably intelligent reader could blow that generalization apart in the time it ta...”
“Poor is what people become, not what they are born to be.”
“I tell you, say the rich,the poor are naughtbut dirty windwelling in air-shaftsover the cindersand droppings ofthe past, theirvoices thickwith greaseand ordure,sewer-greedto corrode the earwith the...”
“The most impoverished peasant can be delighted by the opening of the first spring flower, and the most wealthy aristocrat can curse the day he was born because of some petty offense to his sensibil...”
“If you go out into the real world, you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate but because they cannot retain the returns of their labor. They have no...”
“Even today we don't pay serious attention to the issue of poverty, because the powerful remain relatively untouched by it. Most people distance themselves from the issue by saying that if the poor ...”
“You say you care about the poor? Tell me their names.”
“When everyone is poor you don't know you're poor. My father worked so some of the boys thought I was actually rich.”
“Jesus, I prayed silently, please fix it so that my turn to read wont come around. And then the nun called my name, but before I stood I thought, Ill bet you think this is funny, huh, Jesus? I stoo...”
“The great principle of out-of-door relief is, to give the paupers exactly what they don't want; and then they get tired of coming.”
“If you have a poverty of heart then you are the poorest among the poor.”
“Being broke didn't seem so awful as it had yesterday, being broke but being at peace with the world.("Don't Wait Up For Me Tonight")”
“Learning about Poverty. Two young American Jesuits showed up at the Jesuit headquarters in Rome. Father Arrupe asked what assignment had brought them there. They explained that they were on their w...”
“We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won”
“It was one of the links between the ground-down poor and the wasteful rich. The girl felt that even if she had less than anybody in Williamsburg, somehow she had more. She was richer because she ha...”
“Look at that sea, girls--all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen. We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds.”
“How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?”
“I come from a poor family.”
