219 quotes found
“[W]hen it's slow, they send you home, and when it's busy, they expect you to stay late. They also expect you to be able to come in to cover someone's shift if a co-worker gets sick at the last minu...”
“Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to p...”
“A man may beg, but a woman has to sell.”
“It is a common condition of being poor... you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute str...”
“The wealth of a soul is measured by how much it can feel... its poverty by how little.”
“A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things. ”
“But words mattered, more so in Newark than many other places. In a world where income and possessions were limited, words represented dignity, pride, self-worth.”
“This is why we said 'ain't'and 'he don't'.We wanted words to fitour cold linoleum,our oil lamps, ourouthouse. We knewbetter but it was wrongto use a languagethat named ghosts,nothing you could touch.”
“It is good," he thought "to taste for yourself everything you need to know. That worldly pleasures and wealth are not good things, I learned even as a child. I knew it for a long time, but only now...”
“The poor, I am told, are kind to each other but that is because they have nothing to lose,' he said. 'The rich cannot afford to be.”
“Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.”
“Certainly, the wealth of the rich is a consequence of the poverty of the poor. (Lori Altmann, p. 85)”
“Both poverty and riches are the offspring of thought.”
“I've never understood it,' continued Wilfred Carr, yawning. 'It's not in my line at all; I never had enough money for my own wants, let alone for two. Perhaps if I were as rich as you or Croesus I ...”
“One can slide between poor and rich, the difference as slight as between paper and parchment, one voice and a choir, arms hanging by sides and a hug.”
“Anytime the rich and poor combine, we should listen to whoever has the least power. Rich people are conditioned to assess the world through our privileges. The powerful tend to discredit or ignore ...”
“As I was to learn, patience and latitude and even humility are, paradoxically, the handmaidens of wealth, because virtue is costly only for those who own nothing else.”
“No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great majority are so by force of poverty; they are still chained to a place, to an occupation, and to conformity with the will of an emplo...”
“How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics.”
“People up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with...”
