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Quote by Jean Drèze

“Sure, some rich people work hard – but so do koilawalas, construction workers, and domestic helpers. Other bases of privilege have little to do with personal merit: our aptitudes, health, inheritance, social connections, and other assets derive from contingencies (such as the accident of birth) over which we have no control. Even our education reflects inherited circumstances, and our parents’ and teachers’ efforts, far more than our own. All this is without going into the fact that wealth and power often build on corruption, exploitation, and crime”

Quote by Jean Drèze

Book:Sense and Solidarity: Jholawala Economics for Everyone
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Sense and Solidarity: Jholawala Economics for Everyone

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Jean Drèze

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PurposePovertyRecoveryMeaningOutcast
Book:Upstairs In The Crazy House: The Life Of A Psychiatric Survivor
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“There was an inevitability about our kind of illness, a knowledge that lurking over the next hill was our private monster, which would grab us, shake us up and eventually deposit us in a hospital bed, doped to the gills with anti-psychotic medication, not remembering much of anything and not caring that we couldn't.”

PovertyMental IllnessPsychiatric Survivor
Book:Upstairs In The Crazy House: The Life Of A Psychiatric Survivor
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“Andy had taken my jeans and a pair of his that no longer fit over to the laundromat with some change earned from the owner. He washed and dried them while I waited under the covers in my bed. When he had finished, he presented the two pairs to me with a rare, honest smile. There were few things I would have appreciated more than this, and I did not hesitate to let him know how pleased and happy he'd made me. Those filthy jeans had become my private nightmare, and having only one pair left me in fear of a broken zipper or a tear where it counted. I felt like a child putting on freshly laundered pajamas, cared for, loved.”

PovertyGratitude
Book:Upstairs In The Crazy House: The Life Of A Psychiatric Survivor
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Book:Upstairs In The Crazy House: The Life Of A Psychiatric Survivor
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“Today, as in colonial Virginia, the wealthy and powerful maintain an unequal society with the complicity of white people who share color with them but class with almost everybody else.... Though my view of Bacon's Rebellion has changed over the years, I keep coming back to it. There's something vexingly American in the story, in the violence and in the hope--and in the lengths that the powerful will go to try to stop the most natural yearnings of all, for human connection and for freedom.”

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Book:Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
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Book:Porno Valley
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