“There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.”
“The bus is late. Cars drive by. Rich people n cars never look at people on the street, at all. Poor ones always do ... in fact it sometimes seems they're just driving around, looking at people on the street. I've done that. Poor people wait a lot. Welfare, unemployment lines, laundromats, phone booths, emergency rooms, jails, etc.”
Source: A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories
“You are a collection of your own thoughts. What thoughts you generate these are accumulated and formed your own destiny.
If you richly think, you become rich, if you poorly think, you become poor. Therefore, your thought is the master of your own life.”
“However, as we see in the writings of several liberal political economists, the main problem was not poverty per se, since poverty was actually believed to play a useful function in compelling certain groups of people to labour. Rather, the problem was that there was a constant threat of the poor falling into indigence, which, it was argued, encouraged immoral and criminal offences, thus rendering society less secure. The nineteenth-century institutions and discourses that governed poverty and criminality worked together to police the line between poverty and indigence and to preserve the former while eliminating the threat associated with the latter.”
Source: Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare
“It is stereotypically English to accept that we are born with a fixed ‘station’ in life. It’s what keeps the poor downtrodden.”
Source: Gigolo: Inside the Secret World of the Super Rich
“If you live in a house that needs shingles, you will attend a school that needs books, and while sitting in that school's desk you'll struggle to focus because your tooth needs a dentist or your stomach needs food.”
Source: Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
“The day the world learns to measure the net worth of an entrepreneur based on their direct involvement in social welfare and not with money, is the day we'll begin to make substantial strides in eradicating poverty and hunger.”
Source: Ain't Enough to Look Human
“Every time you waste money on nonessentials, you are essentially contributing to the economic disparities of the world.”
Source: Ain't Enough to Look Human
“I see the fight against sexism, racism, poverty, and even war finding their union not in synonymity but in their ultimate goal — a world more humane.”
Source: We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
“From the onset, reformist white women with class privilege were well aware that the power and freedom they wanted was the freedom they perceived men of their class enjoying.”
Source: Where We Stand: Class Matters