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Poor Quotes

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Poor Quotes

“In America, you are not required to offer food to the hungry or shelter the homeless. There is no ordinance forcing you to visit the lonely, or comfort the infirmed. No where in the Constitution does it say you have to provide clothing to the poor. In fact, one of the nicest things about living here in America, is that you really don't have to do anything for anybody. But when you do, you give meaning and provide soul to the concept of community...and develop a sense of purpose to something greater than one's self.”

“Dispossessed peasants slash-and-burn their way into the rain forests of Latin America, hungry nomads turn their herds out into fragile African rangeland, reducing it to desert, and small farmers in India and the Philippines cultivate steep slopes, exposing them to the erosive powers of rain. Perhaps half the world's billion-plus absolute poor are caught in a downward spiral of ecological and economic impoverishment. In desperation, they knowingly abuse the land, salvaging the present by savaging the future.”

“The poor are always rich in children, and in the dirt and ditches of this street there are groups of them from morning to night, hungry, naked and dirty. Children are the living flowers of the earth, but these had the appearance of flowers that have faded prematurely, because they grew in ground where there was no healthy nourishment.”

“Life is a charity ball given by the leaders of society. A few dance, get their charity's worth to the last penny; and the poor stand outside the gate and watch with hungry eyes the glint of jewels in the warm air. Then comes the lackey Death, and he says: "Madam and my Master, your carriage waits." So they go away into the dark in the carriage of the black plumes, and the dancing continues.”

“We got interested in aesthetics, and then at the end of all of it we fell off the precipice. It's almost like crawling back because so many techniques are lost, and so we're going to have a [small] reserve of teachers who can teach the vast number of interested students. We have these poor, hungry, starving people who want to learn something and no place to get it. It's a tragedy.”

“If sometimes our poor people have had to die of starvation, it is not that God didn't care for them, but because you and I didn't give, were not an instrument of love in the hands of God, to give them that bread, to give them that clothing; because we did not recognize him, when once more Christ came in distressing disguise, in the hungry man, in the lonely man, in the homeless child, and seeking for shelter.”

“Do not let the bread of the hungry mildew in your larder! Do not let moths eat the poor man's cloak. Do not store the shoes of the barefoot. Do not hoard the money of the needy. Things you possess in too great abundance belong to the poor and not to you. You are the thief who steals from God if you are able to help your neighbor and refuse to do it.”

“Too much of the world's happiness depends on taking from one to satisfy another. To increase my standard of living, someone in another part of the world must lower his. The worldwide crisis of hunger that we face today is a result of that method of pursuing happiness. Industrialized nations acquire appetites for more and more luxuries and higher and higher standards of living, and increasing numbers of people are made poor and hungry. It doesn't have to be that way.”

“If positive Christianity means love of one's neighbour, i.e. the tending of the sick, the clothing of the poor, the feeding of the hungry, the giving of drink to those who are thirsty, then it is we who are the more positive Christians. For in these spheres the community of the people of National Socialist Germany has accomplished a prodigious work.”

“If a man were poor or hungry, [some] would say, let us pray for him. I would suggest a little different regimen for a person in this condition: rather take him a bag of flour and a little beef or pork, and a little sugar and butter. A few such comforts will do him more good than your prayers. And I would be ashamed to ask the Lord to do something that I would not do myself. Then go to work and help the poor yourselves first, and do all you can for them, and then call upon God to do the balance.”

“Throughout our world the cry of the poor so often goes unheard. The prophets harangued Israel and Judah unceasingly about the powerless and marginalized, the overlooked widows, orphans, and "sojourners in our midst," who are still with us today as single mothers, hungry children, and helpless immigrants, wraiths invisible in our prosperous societies.”

“I said I didn't think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes - better than the rich had ever lived, except that their lives would constantly be in danger from the hungry predatory poor. All the technology would serve the rich, but they would need it for their own protection and to assure their continued prosperity.”