I have nothing, so I think having something would mean everything to me. But I don’t want to get to the point where I have everything, so having something would mean nothing to me.

What do you see out there?” I ask. “Pittsburgh,” he replies. Now I laugh. “No, young man. What you see is hell with the lid taken off.” — Mother Jones

Am I ever angry or frustrated? I only feel angry sometimes when I see waste, when things that we waste are what people need, things that would save them from dying. Frustrated? No, never.

Let these men sing out their songs,they've been walking all day long,all their fortune's spent and gone...silver dollar in the subway station;quarters for the papers for the jobs.

His lines had been honed over centuries, passed down through generations, for poor people needed certain lines; the script was always the same, and they had no option but to beg for mercy.

Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.

Poverty scrapes these homes down until they all look the same, and they all have in common the absence of things that ought to be there. I might as well have been at one place all my life.

Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.

Unprovoked hostility is often but displaced self-defense: 'I must stop him before he stops me.' In many of such environments, nobody is really hateful so much as they are just fearful.

Hungry for love, He looks at you. Thirsty for kindness, He begs of you. Naked for loyalty, He hopes in you. Homeless for shelter in your heart, He asks of you. Will you be that one to Him?

Nobody is responsible for your sorrows and poverty, not even the devil. It is the work of the enemies of time that lives in some men, and their names are, 'Laziness and Procrastination'.

She was not granted the luxury of forgetting her lower middle-class existence where life hangs by an unseen thread to every hope and where every slash of disappointment shrinks the life further.

In rural and struggling Lexington, Virginia, Lee's new postwar home, one writer joked darkly dollars were so scarce that they had to be introduced to one another when they met on Main Street.

By defining the problem as "hunger," the emergency food system is helping to direct our attention away from the more fundamental problem of poverty, and the even more basic problem of inequality.

This is the basis for the most important critique of microfinance. The poor are not entrepreneurs. The idea that more than a few will turn tiny loans into a viable business is simply unrealistic.