Oscar Arias Quotes

A hungry man is not a free man.

Poor men's reasons are not heard.

Give the peasants neither life nor death.

The hungry and homeless don't care about liberty any more than they care for cultural heritage.

It is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.

A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. And while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

I will always be on the side of those who have nothing.

Discrimination will impair democracy.

I cannot fail to note once again that the poor constitute the modern challenge, especially for the well-off of our planet, where millions of people live in inhuman conditions and many are literally dying of hunger. It is not possible to announce God the Father to these brothers and sisters without taking on the responsibility of building a more just society in the name of Christ.

It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world.

The familiar mood that awaits the sensitive young who are poor and dispossessed is a mood of sharp and painful inferiority, of violently angry tensions, of desperate and overwhelming longings.

I'd become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what color they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake.

There is also a natural and very, very strong empathy with the underdog, with people who have suffered, people who have been pushed around by foreigners in particular, but also by their own people.

Twenty years on, the books are still fun to write and I've still got lots of stories I want to tell, mainly about social injustice and people chewed up by the system.

The poor prey on one another because their lives offer no hope and communicate the tragic message to these human beings that they have no possibility to attain a decent standard of living.

Bill Cosby is a famous black guy who has a bully pulpit the size of the world; it's global. He puts his colossal foot on the vulnerable necks of poor people, and as a result of that, we don't have a balanced conversation.

The world is an enormous injustice.

It is my duty to voice the suffering of men, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain-high.

Segregation is that which is forced upon an inferior by a superior. Separation is done voluntarily by two equals.

When you come from desperate poverty, and that's exactly what I come from, you know that nonsenses are not to be tolerated. I'm not sure who gains from chaos, but I know it's not the poor folks in the council flats. The politics of vindictiveness is never, ever anything like a solution.

When a person is humiliated, when his rights are being violated, and he does not have the proper education, naturally he gravitates toward terrorism.

As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!