“He began stealing as a means of survival, but later did it just to go back to jail. At least, while in prison, he was able to get free room and board. He learned to play the system and allow it to work for him.”
Source: The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel
“When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.”
“When people think of food stamps they don't envision someone like me, someone plain faced and white, someone like the girl they'd known in highschool, someone who'd been quiet but nice, someone like a neighbor, someone like them. Maybe that made them too nervous about their own situation. Maybe they saw in me the chance of their own fragile circumstances, that with one lost job, one divorce, they'd be in the same place as me.”
Source: Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive
“Despite being wealthy and having the two story houses of our American dreams, the marbled sink bathrooms, the offices with bay windows looking out at the water, their lives still lacked something. I became fascinated by the things hidden in dark corners and the self help books for hope. Maybe they just had longer hallways and bigger closets to hide the things that scared them.”
Source: Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive
“On the streets you'll stay, and your children, and it'll be no more than you deserve. We are punishing poverty," she said, pushing away her plate: "If you are poor, and miserable, and behave as you might well expect a poor and miserable person to behave, since there's precious little else to pass the time, then your sentence is more misery, and more poverty.”
Source: The Essex Serpent
“Six shillings a week does not keep body and soul together very unitedly.”
Source: Three Men in a Boat
“You can do that when you’re rich and famous. You can decide that wealth and renown are worthless when you have them.”
Source: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
“Seeing the poor as one vast homogenous mass, we overlook that saving ten children from a painful death by hunger does make a real difference, all the difference for these children, and that this difference is quite significant even when many other children remain hungry.”
Source: World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms
“Ecofeminists call attention to the fact that environmentalists, feminists, and those fighting racism and poverty, are pulling on different straws in the same broom.”
Source: Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice
“Those working in slaughterhouses, for example, are often underpaid and overworked, lack insurance, and are required to use dangerous equipment without adequate training. Turnover and rates of injury for jobs in anymal industries are among the highest in the United States. Slaughterhouse employees are almost always poor, they are often immigrants, and they are inevitably viewed by their employers as expendable. Moreover, if we would not like to kill pigs, hens, or cattle all day long, then we should not make food choices that require others to do so. Our dietary choices determine where others work. Will our poorest laborers work in fields of green or in buildings of blood? Fieldwork is difficult, but I worked in the fields as a child, and I am very glad that I never worked in a slaughterhouse.”
Source: Animals and World Religions