c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
She had developed a number of habits in her younger years, none of which carried with them a bright future, and the things she would offer to do for a couple of dollars would make the Devil blush.
— Rachel Autumn Deering, Husk
I never doubted I would have a roof over my head, a school to go to, enough to to eat, books (and newspapers) to read, a safe neighborhood to play in and a doctor to see if I got sick.My parents and grandparents made sure I knew I was lucky.
— Chelsea Clinton, It's Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired & Get Going!
The truth is, Japan is headed for crisis. We are in the hands of greedy businessmen and weak politicians. Such people will see to it poverty grows every day.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World & The Remains of the Day
Poverty cannot be defeated unless you first defeat it in the mind.
— Nicky Verd
God's friendship is with people who know their poverty.
— Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest
As to having a preference, that was new too. You take what you're given and you're grateful for it. Once that message is well and truly ingrained in you, it feels like vainglory to imagine one's own likes and dislikes could matter to other people.
— Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer
If you can see through my eyes, you may see the real beauty I see in poor people, in old age homes, unprivileged children, abandoned houses, empty streets, broken dreams unfulfilled expectations. You can see the new life struggling beneath our comfortable lives.
— Ratish Edwards
Papa used to say that wealth is a sin and poverty is a punishment but that God apparently wants there to be no connection between the sin and the punishment. One man sins and another is punished. That's how the world is made.
— Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness
Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times.
— Graham Greene, Travels With My Aunt
Looking at these people now from behind the counter, made her feel like that little girl again, the deprived child that used to press her nose on the glass, peering at things she could never have.
— Effrosyni Moschoudi, The Lady of the Pier - The Ebb
Instead he was grabbing at whatever was available in this system that no longer held the old predictable relationship between effort and result as true
— Panashe Chigumadzi, Sweet Medicine
Silently, she wondered whether this was the same desperation, the same impotence that grips many men by their shirts, their T-shirts, their work vests, gripping them equally hard, shaking them and leading them to drink,to beating or the noose. Was this it?
— Panashe Chigumadzi, Sweet Medicine
Granted, many of them replied, that socialism may not result in riches for all but rather in a smaller production of wealth; nevertheless the masses will be happier under socialism, because they will share their worries with all their fellow citizens, and there will not be wealthier classes to be envied by poorer ones. The starving and ragged workers of Soviet Russia, they tell us, are a thousand times more joyful than the workers of the West who live under conditions which are luxurious compared to Russian standards; equality in poverty is a more satisfactory state than well-being where there are people who can flaunt more luxuries than the average man.
— Ludwig von Mises
Maybe the greatest anger and frustration come not from unemployment or poverty or the lack of a future but from the feeling that you have no culture, because you've been torn between cultures, between incompatible symbols. How can you exist if you don't know where you are? So you burn cars, ecause when you have no culture, you're no longer a civilised animal, you're a wild beast. And a wild beast burns and kills and pillages.
— Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
They don't know what poor is. They don't know that poverty is a sharp knife carving away at you. They don't know what it does to the body. To a mind.
— Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star
Mostly the greedy rich is responsible for the poor’s poverty!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Poverty was a dog whose teeth sank deep.
— Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People
How was a boy who'd tasted poverty ever expected to choose the poorer road?
— Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden
Can the law get blood out of a stone? I haven't any money.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
The poor who commit murder, rape and robbery are not only not starving, they have far more material things than the word ‘poverty’ suggests.
— Dennis Prager, A Dark Time in America
In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not neccessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
How agonized we are by how people die. How unconcerned we are by how they live.
— P. Sainath
If I had a single wish, I would wish sixty seconds of total depravity upon myself. For one of the greatest gifts of all is to have ‘nothing’ so that I can finally learn how to appreciate ‘everything’.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Natural disasters happen from time to time but poverty happens all the time and therefore poverty is the greatest tragedy, it is the greatest disaster of mankind!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences - deep, corrosive, obstinate differences - radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.
— Lyndon B. Johnson
All forms of dire poverty and brutality were things to forbid as insults to the fair body of mankind, every injustice a false note to avoid in the harmony of the spheres.
— Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
The essence of economic inequality is borne out in a simple fact: there are 400 billionaires in the United States and 45 million people living in poverty. These are not parallel facts
—  they are intersecting facts. There are 400 American billionaires
There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood. I have nothing but contempt for the people who despise money. They are hypocrites or fools. Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off. The only thing to be careful about is that you do not pay more than a shilling for the shilling you earn. You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent. I pity with all my heart the artist, whether he writes or paints, who is entirely dependent for subsistence upon his art.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.
— John Stuart Mill
Poverty would always exist when we allow injustices to speak.
— Henry Johnson Jr
Leaders should never alienate themselves from the poor, if their main aim is to alleviate poverty.
— Gift Gugu Mona
You know what you learn when you study the legal system? Poor people pass down damage the way rich people pass down an inheritance.
— Dan Chaon, Ill Will
When you have no choice, you have no discontent either.
— Vivek Shanbhag, Ghachar Ghochar
Anyone called upon to view misery will view criminality differently. All state officials should be required to spend a month serving in a homeless shelter to learn love.
— Joseph Roth
Greed is the fast-track to poverty.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
The corporate media spends a lot of time covering the lifestyles of the rich and the famous, but not all that much time covering the poor and the desperate. To a large degree, these people , the millions of poor people in America, are invisible, living under the radar screen. Their suffering is not seen on our evening news. But it's there.
— Bernie Sanders, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In
But they had learned an important lesson about how defeating poverty is more difficult than it seems at first.
— Nicholas D. Kristof, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
Poverty must be erased by hard work.
— Sunday Adelaja
By and large, the poor do not want some small life. They don't want to game the system or eke out an existence; they want to thrive and contribute.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life.Do you consider all this desirable? No, I don't. But it may be that the psychological adjustment which the working class are visibly making is the best they could make in the circumstances. They have neither turned revolutionary nor lost their self-respect; merely they have kept their tempers and settled down to make the best of things on a fish-and-chip standard. The alternative would be God knows what continued agonies of despair; or it might be attempted insurrections which, in a strongly governed country like England, could only lead to futile massacres and a regime of savage repression.
— George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
For most Americans of the eighteenth century, it was assumed impossible for a servant to shed his lowly origins; the meaner sort, as one newspaper insisted, could never “wash out the stain of servility.” There were fears that the meaner sort were treading too close on the heels of those above them.
— Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
External explanations of black-white differences — discrimination or poverty, for example—seem to many to be more amenable to public policy than internal explanations such as culture. Those with this point of view tend to resist cultural explanations but there is yet another reason why some resist understanding the counterproductive effects of an anachronistic culture: Alternative explanations of economic and social lags provide a more satisfying ability to blame all such lags on the sins of others, such as racism or discrimination. Equally important, such external explanations require no painful internal changes in the black population but leave all changes to whites, who are seen as needing to be harangued, threatened, or otherwise forced to change.In short, prevailing explanations provide an alibi for those who lag—and an alibi is for many an enormously valuable asset that they are unlikely to give up easily.
— Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals
Our contemporary poverty is as transparent as glass and as invisible as the air. Our poverty is kilometer-long lines, the constant elbowing, spiteful officials, trains late without reason, the water cut off by some disaster (...), the monotony of living without any hope whatsoever, the decaying historic cities, the provinces emptying the rivers poisoned. Our poverty is the grace of the totalitarian state by whose grace we live.
— Tadeusz Konwicki, A Minor Apocalypse
The difference between poverty and prosperity is the mindset of living out of necessity instead of possibility.
— Farshad Asl
To cause pain was a disease. As a child I imagined tiny, almost invisible animals that arrived in the neighborhood at night, they came from the ponds, from the abandoned train cars beyond the embankment, from the stinking grasses called fetienti, from the frogs, the salamanders, the flies, the rocks, the dust, and entered the water and the food and the air, making our mothers, our grandmothers as angry as starving dogs.
— Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
We failed to learn from the stories that warned us that if we create environments that perpetuate poverty, that force the people in them to beg and steal, the we're equally to blame for many of their outcomes
— Ginger Scott, The Hard Count
It is quite wrong to assume that poor people are generally unwilling to change; but the proposed change must stand in some organic relationship to what they are doing already, and they are rightly suspicious of, and resistant to, radical changes proposed by town-based and office-bound innovators who approach them in the spirit of: "You just get out of my way and I shall show you how useless you are and how splendidly the job can be done with a lot of foreign money and outlandish equipment.
— Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
We eat junk because it's cheap and it lights up the pleasure centers of our brain. And we do drugs because it's an effective way to feel good or escape something.
— Linda Tirado, Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America
We are well,' Efuru replied. 'It is only hunger.''It is good that it is only hunger. Good health is what we pray for.
— Flora Nwapa, Efuru
Every era in the continent's vaunted developmental story had its own taxonomy of waste people-unwanted and unsalvageable. Each era had its own means of distancing its version of white trash from the mainstream ideal.
— Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
You may proclaim, good sirs, your fine philosophy, but till you feed us right and wrong can wait. Or is it only those who have the money who can enter the land of milk and honey?
— Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera
I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to 'LIllustration. Something desperate, you know."Zagreus smiled. "You're a poor man, Mersault. That explains half of your disgust. And the other half you owe to your own submission to poverty.
— Albert Camus, A Happy Death
They did not kill Hunger, for people were made to always want new things to taste. They did not destroy Poverty, for poverty reminds us to be humble. They did not destroy Sleep, for people sometimes need to forget their troubles and restore their energy. And they did not defeat Old Age, for there must always be room for the new people being born.
— James Bruchac & Joseph Bruchac
I don't, when I think of a city, think of these people, people with very little who are content with that. That is, I think about poverty and culture and traffic and pollution and crime...
— Jon Chopan, Pulled from the River
Poor people have been voting for big government liberalism for 50 years... and they are still poor.
— Charles Barkley
it is hard to argue that housing is not a fundamental human need. Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country. The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality. Because black men were disproportionately incarcerated and black women disproportionately evicted, uniformly denying housing to applicants with recent criminal or eviction records still had an incommensurate impact on African Americans.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. 57 Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. 58 Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total ) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion. Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. 59 If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent—at least when it comes to housing—we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians’ canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, a comrade, an eccentric, a sage, a virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, a hard case, a spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur; to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognized the following day as the most neglected genius of the age. Each of these ambitions had something to recommend it from one angle or another, with the possible exception of being poor - the only aim Trapnel achieved with unqualified mastery - and even being poor, as Trapnel himself asserted, gave the right to speak categorically when poverty was discussed by people like Evadne Clapham.
— Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room
I thought, if we could just come together as a community, even if that just meant playing soccer together, that could be the beginning of something good. Coming together as a community, as a people, creates more power than exists when individuals are fighting each other for scraps. Soccer has always brought people together. Soccer was where I would begin.
— Kennedy Odede, Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum
Universal housing programs have been successfully implemented all over the developed world. In countries that have such programs, every single family with an income below a certain level who meets basic program requirements has a right to housing assistance.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Often, evicted families also lose the opportunity to benefit from public housing because Housing Authorities count evictions and unpaid debt as strikes when reviewing applications. And so people who have the greatest need for housing assistance—the rent-burdened and evicted—are systematically denied it.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Poor families are living above their means, in apartments they cannot afford. The thing is, those apartments are already at the bottom of the market. 24 Our cities have become unaffordable to our poorest families, and this problem is leaving a deep and jagged scar on the next generation.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Exploitation. Now, there’s a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate. 42 It is a word that speaks to the fact that poverty is not just a product of low incomes. It is also a product of extractive markets. Boosting poor people’s incomes by increasing the minimum wage or public benefits, say, is absolutely crucial. But not all of those extra dollars will stay in the pockets of the poor. Wage hikes are tempered if rents rise along with them, just as food stamps are worth less if groceries in the inner city cost more—and they do, as much as 40 percent more, by one estimate. 43 Poverty is two-faced—a matter of income and expenses, input and output—and in a world of exploitation, it will not be effectively ameliorated if we ignore this plain fact.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
There are two way of escaping your poverty,' he offers quietly. 'One, you can use drugs, get drunk - escape. Or you can escape into the world of books; that can be your refuge.
— Kennedy Odede, Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum
In 2013, 1 percent of poor renters lived in rent-controlled units; 15 percent lived in public housing; and 17 percent received a government subsidy, mainly in the form of a rent-reducing voucher. The remaining 67 percent—2 of every 3 poor renting families—received no federal assistance. 32 This drastic shortfall in government support, coupled with rising rent and utility costs alongside stagnant incomes, is the reason why most poor renting families today spend most of their income on housing.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
For almost a century, there has been broad consensus in America that families should spend no more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Until recently, most renting families met this goal. But times have changed—in Milwaukee and across America. Every year in this country, people are evicted from their homes not by the tens of thousands or even the hundreds of thousands but by the millions.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
The Hinkstons expected more of their landlord for the money they were paying her. Rent was their biggest expense by far, and they wanted a decent and functional home in return. They wanted things to be fixed when they broke. But if Sherrena wasn’t going to repair her own property, neither were they. The house failed the tenants, and the tenants failed the house.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
I think of what it means to be a teenager in America, necessarily pushing boundaries, making expected mistakes. Here there is no margin for error: a mistake, no matter how insignificant, dashes any small hopes to break the cycle of poverty. Here in Kibera the world is relentless and unforgiving.
— Jessica Posner, Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum
Beloved, Dearest One:How I long to shout to the world our happiness. I feel that you and I are the only two people alive in the world - the only people that know the secret meaning of existence.I have no diamond rings, no gifts of love that other lovers have for their beloved. My poetry is all I have to offer you. And so I dedicate my collected verses, 'Poems of Poverty,' to you, beloved.Morris.
— Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers
Poverty is a mindset: It creates that sense of scarcity. You then become accustomed to it such that your life is hinged on protecting the scarce resources that you have. However, you can only create a mindset of abundance by investing what you have and not savings. Savings only becomes significant if it's done with a motive to invest.
— Oscar Bimpong
I looked at the people, then, and I saw how busy they were - how much industry and energy described their lives.
— Gregory David Roberts
If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
The year the police called Sherrena, Wisconsin saw more than one victim per week murdered by a current or former romantic partner or relative. 10 After the numbers were released, Milwaukee’s chief of police appeared on the local news and puzzled over the fact that many victims had never contacted the police for help. A nightly news reporter summed up the chief’s views: “He believes that if police were contacted more often, that victims would have the tools to prevent fatal situations from occurring in the future.” What the chief failed to realize, or failed to reveal, was that his department’s own rules presented battered women with a devil’s bargain: keep quiet and face abuse or call the police and face eviction.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
The profits were staggering. In 1966, a Chicago landlord told a court that on a single property he had made $42,500 in rent but paid only $2,400 in maintenance. When accused of making excessive profits, the landlord simply replied, “That’s why I bought the building.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
But it was not enough simply to perceive injustice. Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things. For poor people, this required identifying with the oppressed, and counting yourself among them—which was something most trailer park residents were absolutely unwilling to do.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
It was not that low-income renters didn’t know their rights. They just knew those rights would cost them.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
There is nothing in the prospect of a sharp, unceasing battle for the bare necessities of life to encourage looking ahead, everything to discourage the effort….The evil day of reckoning is put off till a to-morrow that may never come. When it does come…it simply adds another hardship to a life measured from the cradle by such incidents.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
In white neighborhoods, only 1 in 41 properties that could have received a nuisance citation actually did receive one. In black neighborhoods, 1 in 16 eligible properties received a citation. A woman reporting domestic violence was far more likely to land her landlord a nuisance citation if she lived in the inner city.In the vast majority of cases (83 percent), landlords who received a nuisance citation for domestic violence responded by either evicting the tenants or by threatening to evict them for future police calls. Sometimes, this meant evicting a couple, but most of the time landlords evicted women abused by men who did not live with them.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
When tenants relinquished protections by falling behind in rent or otherwise breaking their rental agreement, landlords could respond by neglecting repairs. Or as Sherrena put it to tenants: “If I give you a break, you give me a break.” Tenants could trade their dignity and children’s health for a roof over their head. 13 Between 2009 and 2011, nearly half of all renters in Milwaukee experienced a serious and lasting housing problem. 14 More than 1 in 5 lived with a broken window; a busted appliance; or mice, cockroaches, or rats for more than three days. One-third experienced clogged plumbing that lasted more than a day. And 1 in 10 spent at least a day without heat. African American households were the most likely to have these problems—as were those where children slept. Yet the average rent was the same, whether an apartment had housing problems or did not. Tenants who fell behind either had to accept unpleasant, degrading, and sometimes dangerous housing conditions or be evicted. But from a business point of view, this arrangement could be lucrative.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Most poor people in America were like Arleen: they did not live in public housing or apartments subsidized by vouchers. Three in four families who qualified for assistance received nothing.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
For many landlords, it was cheaper to deal with the expense of eviction than to maintain their properties; it was possible to skimp on maintenance if tenants were perpetually behind; and many poor tenants would be perpetually behind because their rent was too high.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
If you count all forms of involuntary displacement—formal and informal evictions, landlord foreclosures, building condemnations—you discover that between 2009 and 2011 more than 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced a forced move.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Fewer and fewer families can afford a roof over their head. This is among the most urgent and pressing issues facing America today, and acknowledging the breadth and depth of the problem changes the way we look at poverty. For decades, we’ve focused mainly on jobs, public assistance, parenting, and mass incarceration. No one can deny the importance of these issues, but something fundamental is missing. We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly all of them have a landlord.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Today, the majority of poor renting families in America spend over half of their income on housing, and at least one in four dedicates over 70 percent to paying the rent and keeping the lights on.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Poverty, her mother has written, makes you clever, and Honora knows that this is true.
— Anita Shreve, Sea Glass
But this house felt strange. Dave asked what was going on, and John explained that the name on the eviction order belonged to the mother of several of the children. She had died two months earlier, and the children had simply gone on living in the house, by themselves. As the movers swept through the rooms, Gray Eyes took charge, giving orders to the other children; the youngest was a boy of about eight or nine. Upstairs, the movers found ratty mattresses on the floor and empty liquor bottles displayed like trophies. In the damp basement, clothes were flung everywhere. The house and the yard were littered with trash. “Disgusting,” Tim said to the roaches scaling the kitchen wall. As the landlord changed the locks with a power drill and the movers pushed the contents of the house onto the wet curb, the children began to run around and laugh. When the move was done, the crew gathered by the trucks, instinctively stomping the ground to shake loose any stowaway roaches. Those who smoked reached for their packs. They didn’t know where the children would go, and they didn’t ask.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Poor black families were “immersed in a domestic web of a large number of kin and friends whom they [could] count on,” wrote the anthropologist Carol Stack in All Our Kin. Those entwined in such a web swapped goods and services on a daily basis. This did little to lift families out of poverty, but it was enough to keep them afloat. But large-scale social transformations—the crack epidemic, the rise of the black middle class, and the prison boom among them—had frayed the family safety net in poor communities. So had state policies like Aid to Families with Dependent Children that sought to limit “kin dependence” by giving mothers who lived alone or with unrelated roommates a larger stipend than those who lived with relatives.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Evictions were deserved, understood to be the outcome of individual failure. They “helped get rid of the riffraff,” some said. No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.In years past, renters opposed landlords and saw themselves as a “class” with shared interests and a unified purpose. During the early twentieth century, tenants organized against evictions and unsanitary conditions. When landlords raised rents too often or too steeply, tenants went so far as to stage rent strikes. Strikers joined together to withhold rent and form picket lines, risking eviction, arrest, and beatings by hired thugs. They were not an especially radical bunch, these strikers. Most were ordinary mothers and fathers who believed landlords were entitled to modest rent increases and fair profits, but not “price gouging.” In New York City, the great rent wars of the Roaring Twenties forced a state legislature to impose rent controls that remain the country’s strongest to this day.Petitions, picket lines, civil disobedience—this kind of political mobilization required a certain shift in vision.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
No doubt we instinctively prefer to help those who are close to us. Few could stand by and watch a child drown; many can ignore the avoidable deaths of children in Africa or India. The question, however, is not what we usually do, but what we ought to do, and it is difficult to see any sound moral justification for the view that distance, or community membership, makes a crucial difference to our obligations.
— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics
First premise: If we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it. Second premise: Extreme poverty is bad. Third premise: There is some extreme poverty we can prevent without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance. Conclusion: We ought to prevent some extreme poverty.
— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics
The focus of innovations and investments need to shift from slogging innovations like phone and, drone type innovations to solve real problems that are killing the inhabitants of the planet.
— Saurabh Gupta Earth5R
It was an old tradition: landlords barring children from their properties. In the competitive postwar housing market of the late 1940s, landlords regularly turned away families with children and evicted tenants who got pregnant. This was evident in letters mothers wrote when applying for public housing. “At present,” one wrote, “I am living in an unheated attic room with a one-year-old baby… Everywhere I go the landlords don’t want children. I also have a ten-year-old boy… I can’t keep him with me because the landlady objects to children. Is there any way that you can help me to get an unfurnished room, apartment, or even an old barn?… I can’t go on living like this because I am on the verge of doing something desperate.” Another mother wrote, “My children are now sick and losing weight… I have tried, begged, and pleaded for a place but [it’s] always ‘too late’ or ‘sorry, no children.’ ” Another wrote, “The lady where I am rooming put two of my children out about three weeks ago and don’t want me to let them come back… If I could get a garage I would take it.”When Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, it did not consider families with children a protected class, allowing landlords to continue openly turning them away or evicting them.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Families with children were turned away in as many as 7 in 10 housing searches.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Urban landlords quickly realized that piles of money could be made by creating slums: “maximum profits came, not from providing first-class accommodations for those who could well afford them… but from crowded slum accommodations, for those whose pennies were scarcer than the rich man’s pounds.” Beginning in the sixteenth century, slum housing would be reserved not only for outcasts, beggars, and thieves but for a large segment of the population.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
In 1930, the death rate for Milwaukee’s blacks was nearly 60 percent higher than the citywide rate, due in large part to poor housing conditions.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Our cities have become unaffordable to our poorest families, and this problem is leaving a deep and jagged scar on our next generation.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
It is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg.
— Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
It is a hard thing for a rich man to grow poor; but it is an awful thing for him to grow dishonest, and some kinds of speculation lead a man deep into dishonesty before he thinks what he is about. Poverty will not make a man worthless—he may be of worth a great deal more when he is poor than he was when he was rich; but dishonesty goes very far indeed to make a man of no value—a thing to be thrown out in the dust-hole of the creation, like a bit of broken basin, or dirty rag.
— George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind
If you are poor and go without food and clothes, don't hope for wealth in paradise, you are already forsaken
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity
And the child—your child—was born there in the midst of misery. It was a deadly place: strange, everything was strange, we women lying there were strange to each other, lonely and hating one another out of misery, the same torment in that crowded ward full of chloroform and blood, screams and groans.
— Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig
Wasn't that what Jesus said: do what I do? He was here as an example for us to follow. Same with all prophets. Didn't the prophets tell us to be like them? That's what's wrong with Christianity. They make Jesus and the prophets into icons, take them off of earth, and put them in heaven to worship them, so they're no longer accessible. You've taken a reality and made it into a worthless idol. Christians talk about the idolatry of other religions, but when they no longer live principles and just worship the people who taught them, that's exactly what they're doing.
— Daniel Suelo, The Man Who Quit Money
If the pocket goes dry but the mind is fertile, awake and plant something noble in the mind and you shall surely reap something noble in the end, no matter what!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
There is no sadder symbol of the crippling poverty in which millions of peasants were forced to live than the image of a peasant and his son struggling to drag a plough through the mud.
— Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924
Then he said the funny thing was the old man himself had left home when he was a kid, after a fight with his own father. The father lit into him for using the wheelbarrow."It was this way. They always carried the feed to the horses, pail by pail. In the winter, when the horses were in the stalls. So my father took the notion to carry it to them in the wheelbarrow. Naturally it was a lot quicker. But he got beat. For laziness. That was the way they were, you know. Any change of any kind was a bad thing. Efficiency was just laziness, to them. That's the peasant thinking for you.
— Alice Munro, A Wilderness Station
The poor who have neither property, friends, nor strength to labor are boarded in the houses of good farmers, to whom a stipulated sum is annually paid. To those who are able to help themselves a little or have friends from whom they derive some succor, inadequate however to their full maintenance, supplementary aids are given which enable them to live comfortably in their own houses or in the houses of their friends. Vagabonds without visible property or vocation, are placed in work houses, where they are well clothed, fed, lodged, and made to labor
— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia
I feel both isolated from poverty – I do not know what my neighbors need or if they need anything – and surrounded by it because now we know all about the hunger and death in the world, and everyone is my neighbor.
— Lori Smith
Charity had always slightly creeped me out: There was nothing quite as condescending as the phrase "helping the less fortunate" rolling off the tongue of a white professional, as if poverty were a matter of luck instead of the result of a political system.
— Sara  Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
There are places where you can live only when you are healthy, in those places when you fall ill it's the end of you for most people there can’t afford medical care.
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity
She’s a lean vixen: I can seethe ribs, the slytrickster’s eyes, filled with longing and desperation, the skinnyfeet, adept at lies.Why encourage the notionof virtuous poverty?It’s only an excusefor zero charity.Hunger corrupts, and absolute hungercorrupts absolutely,
— Margaret Atwood, Morning in the Burned House
Then I told him, ‘Injustice, Poverty and Discrimination is faced by a lot of Indians, and also majority, the fact is that if you “Minority” stop thinking yourself as a part of “Minority” and start thinking as the part of India, and proceed together for it’s good, then only “Minority” and majority would progress altogether.
— Shaikh Ashraf, Friendship, Love & Sacrifice
As long as poverty & hunger is prevalent in any continent or country, then the world at large is never safe.
— Auliq-Ice
The whole scene gave Ashley a fierce ache in the center of her chest. Everything her eyes came across spoke to how these two men lived in some kind of world where hardship was the constant, with only these tiny spaces between heartbeats offering some kind of peace. She saw an apartment that housed two men who lived whatever life they could in the confines of that small space because everything else was no good for anyone.
— Sheldon Lee Compton, Brown Bottle
We extend our best wishes to you, inhabitants of another world.After reading the following message, you should have a basic understanding of civilization on Earth. By dint of long toil and creativity, the human race has built a splendid civilization, blossoming with a multitude of diverse cultures. We have also begun to understand the laws governing the natural world and the development of human societies. We cherish all that we have accomplished.But our world is still flawed. Hate exists, as does prejudice and war. Because of conflicts between the forces of production and the relations of production, wealth distribution is extremely uneven, and large portions of humanity live in poverty and misery.Human societies are working hard to resolve the difficulties and problems they face, striving to create a better future for Earth civilization.The country that sent this message is engaged in this effort. We are dedicated to building an ideal society, where the labor and value of every member of the human race are fully respected, where everyone's material and spiritual needs are fully met, so that civilization on Earth may become more perfect.With the best of intentions, we look forward to establishing contact with other civilized societies in the universe. We look forward to working together with you to build a better life in this vast universe.
— Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem
This is a nation that professes to be a Christian nation," [Suelo] tells me, surveying his temporary kingdom. "And yet it's basically illegal to live according to the teachings of Jesus.
— Mark Sundeen, The Man Who Quit Money
Many a rich man’s bed is bigger than many a poor woman’s bedroom; his bedroom, her house.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The cigar has been smoked out, and we are the ashes.
— Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers
the ignobility of thought and action that desperation born of indigence produces.
— Iain M. Banks, Excession
We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know that we will win. But I've come to believe we're integrating into a burning house.I'm afraid that America may be losing what moral vision she may have had …. And I'm afraid that even as we integrate, we are walking into a place that does not understand that this nation needs to be deeply concerned with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. Until we commit ourselves to ensuring that the underclass is given justice and opportunity, we will continue to perpetuate the anger and violence that tears at the soul of this nation.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
If you refuse to deal with time today, time will deal with you tomorrow.
— Michael Bassey Johnson, Master of Maxims
Stressful conditions from outside school are much more likely to intrude into the classroom in high poverty schools. Every one of ten stressors is two to three times more common in high poverty schools-- Student hunger, unstable housing, lack of medical and dental care, caring for family members, immigration issues, community violence and safety issues.
— Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis
The impoverished always try to keep moving, as if relocating might help.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
She fell on the bread and cheese as if she were a lioness. Did lions eat cheese? He didn’t know. He knew Mrs Prater’s kitten ate cheese. He ate anything. Poor bloody animal. Still, he was a slum cat, no reason why his life should be better than a humans' sad ruddy existence.
— Luggs, Jack the Ripper: The Long Arm of the Law
But apparently you don't need dot-com wealth to ruin an area for its low-income residents. The Pioneer Press quotes Secretary of HUD Andrew Cuomo ruing the "cruel irony" that prosperity is shrinking the stock of affordable housing nationwide: "The stronger the economy, the stronger the upward pressure on rents.
— Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
You did not die when you were drawing public assistance money, but you certainly did not remain alive.
— Nevil Shute, Ruined City
Not every poor or unemployed person who has one wears a political party’s t-shirt to reveal their political affiliation
—  some use it merely to conceal their nipples.
Leftovers are less tasty if they were left over by someone else, unless you are poor.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Every condition exists,” Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, “simply because someone profits by its existence. This economic exploitation is crystallized in the slum.” Exploitation. Now, there’s a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Mostly they all were products of single parents, and in the most tragic category - black boys, with no particular criminal inclinations but whose very lack of direction put them in the crosshairs of the world.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
There seems little correlation between poverty and honesty. One would rather expect the opposite
—  dishonesty may not always pay but surely it sometimes does
A majority of people in these surveys also said that America gives too much aid--but when they were asked how much America should give, the median answers ranged from 5 percent to 10 percent of government spending. In other words, people wanted foreign aid 'cut' to an amount five to ten times greater than the United States actually gives!
— Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
Greeting cards routinely tell us that everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all of the time.
— Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Nothing was simple, certainly not simplification.
— Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
A sure way a country can develop is through a true development of the masses. Yes! A sure way to ensure a true freedom of the people is for the people take up their own destiny into their hands and bond their strengths to positively dare with a clear vision and fortitude like the eagle for a great change in wisdom and in peace, devoid of rebellious motive, massacre and nepotism, and with tenacity, direct the thought, policy and inspiration of the few people who rule the masses for the best change ever! Until this is done, the masses shall always cry out of ignorance, not knowing the real power within them and beg at the feet of the few people for how they should live their lives!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah