poverty

I see a role for specialized knowledge, but I think that it's important for there to be an arena where it is shared, where it is communicated. It's not that somebody shouldn't have specialized knowledge. The ability to dig a trench and lay a cable is a kind of specialized knowledge. Farmers have specialized knowledge, too. The question is: what sort of knowledge is privileged in our societies? I don't think that a CEO is more valuable to society and ought to be paid ten million dollars a year, while farmers and laborers starve.The range of what is valued has become so extreme that one lot of people have captured it and left three-quarters of the world to live in unthinkable poverty, because their work is not valued. What would happen if the sweepers of the city went on strike or the sewage system didn't work? A CEO wouldn't be able to deal with his own shit.

Some ancient oversight had nearly taken his sight, but this sad fuck was already blind inside.

When the statistics have a face, poverty becomes personal.

The day you forget about the poors, you become the poorest of the poor!

Only education, self-respect and rational qualities will uplift the down-trodden.

Rabbi Hiyya advised his wife, __hen a poor man comes to the door, be quick to give him food so that the same may be done to your children._ She exclaimed, __ou are cursing our children [with the suggestion that they may become beggars]._ But Rabbi Hiyya replied, __here is a wheel which revolves in this world._ __abylonian Talmud, Shabbat 151b

A poor man is a living dead one.

A writer can live by his writing. If not so luxuriously as by other trades, then less luxuriously. The nature of the work he does all day will more affect his happiness than the quality of his dinner at night. Whatever be your calling, and however much it brings you in the year, you could still, you know, get more by cheating. We all suffer ourselves to be too much concerned about a little poverty; but such considerations should not move us in the choice of that which is to be the business and justification of so great a portion of our lives; and like the missionary, the patriot, or the philosopher, we should all choose that poor and brave career in which we can do the most and best for mankind.

For the first time in my life, I was eating well and from plates__lass plates, no less, not out of the frying pan because somebody lost all the plates in the last move. Now when we ate, we sat at a fine round oak table in sturdy chairs that matched. No one rushed through the meal or argued over who got the biggest portion, and we ate three times a day.

The great principle of out-of-door relief is, to give the paupers exactly what they don't want; and then they get tired of coming.

Most families around town only had a bottle of aspirin in their medicine cabinets. If you had the flu, you took an aspirin. If you had a toothache, you took an aspirin. If you were bitten by a snake, you took an aspirin. If you developed kidney problems from taking too much aspirin, you took an aspirin. You wouldn't even think of going to the emergency room unless your leg was hanging by a thread. And even then you might wait a while.

If our family was poor, of what did our poverty consist? If our clothes were torn the torn places only let in the sun and wind. In the winter we had no overcoats, but that only meant that we ran rather than loitered. Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty.

Most of [the alchemists] were poor; many all but unknown in their own time, many died and saw no fruit of their labours_ Of some the very names are forgotten. But though their names be dead, their works live, and grow and spread over ever fresh generations of youth, showing them fresh steps towards that temple of wisdom which is the knowledge of things as they are.

The greatest sorrow in the life of a peasant is that his donkey is lost. And the greatest happiness is that he finds it back.

My mother often said, as long as a person is happy at work, then poverty is nothing to be ashamed of.

Every morning, when people are getting up in the tent, the babies are crying, people are pushing each other at the taps outside and some children are already pulling the crusts of porridge off the pots we ate from last night, my first-born brother and I clean our shoes. Our grandmother makes us sit on our mats with our legs straight out so she can look carefully at our shoes to make sure we have done it properly. No other children in the tent have real school shoes. When we three look at them it__ as if we are in a real house again, with no war, no away.

A fog of despair so pervaded the ghetto that the smallest gesture of rebellion could seem like a bold, piercing light. Bad, said with a fond expression, was almost always a compliment.

One of the major destruction of man is distraction