John Clare Quotes

Bankruptcy is a serious decision that people have to make.

The only difference between a pigeon and the American farmer today is that a pigeon can still make a deposit on a John Deere.

We lived in a farm village, and no one could afford to buy a car or to fly. We were envious. We couldn't afford any toys. I couldn't imagine making a real car.

We didn't really feel poor. You don't know that as a kid, but we really didn't have any cash. When machinery broke down, we didn't have money for parts, so we did our best to fix it.

My parents, Mary Agnes Smith and Rowland Smith, both had to work since their early teens, she in the holiday boarding house of her mother and he in his father's market garden in Marton Moss, a village on the south side of Blackpool, just north of Saint Anne's-on-Sea.

So people have been hurting and I understand that. And it doesn't give them comfort or solace for me to tell them, you know, but for me, we would be in a worldwide depression.

We have had a great depression in agriculture, caused mainly by several seasons of bad harvests, and some of our traders have suffered much from a too rapid extension in prosperous years.

My father was raised in the mountains of New Mexico, and he picked cotton for a dollar a day. He was working for the family from the time he was 7.

I was born on a plantation, and things weren't so good. We didn't have any money. I never thought of the word 'poor' 'til I got to be a man, but when you live in a house that you can always peek out of and see what kind of day it is, you're not doing so well. And your rest room is not inside the house.

I wish I could fill every young man who reads these pages with an utter dread and horror of poverty. I wish I could make you so feel its shame, its constraint, its bitterness that you would make vows against it.

I was a Depression kid, growing up in Oklahoma.

I grew up in Palestine, West Virginia, which is mostly a farming community; there aren't a lot of jobs.

I was raised by my grandmother on a farm, where we were really poor - we had dirt floors - but so did everybody else.

The women who file for bankruptcy played by all the rules, but they are still in economic freefall.

Some economists estimate that for every family that goes bankrupt, there are about 15 more who are in the same amount of financial trouble and would profit from bankruptcy but just haven't filed.

When I was a deacon, the ominous signs of the Great Depression began to appear. Tens of thousands lost their jobs. Money was scarce. Families had to do without. Some young people did not ask their mothers, 'What's for dinner?' because they knew all too well that their cupboards held very little.

My parents live out in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of this peach orchard. It's actually Peach County, one of the largest peach-growing counties in Georgia. It's very rural, and there is nothing much going on, so I guess that's had a big influence on everything as far as just not having much to do.

We did not had enough facilities in the village. My family was also not well off. There was no mat, no gym; we used to wrestle in the mud. It was very different from the national camps where I trained before the Commonwealth Games.

Poor? What does that matter? When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window.

Me personally, I come from very, very humble beginnings - little, small town in Alabama, you know, staying at my granddaddy house. We really didn't have nothing.

The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country; their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre--what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation.

I think that so many people don't understand how easy it is to be broke, how easy it is to find yourself in a situation where you're in an absolutely foreign place.

Home I would go But that my doors are hateful to my eyes, Fill'd and damm'd up with gaping creditors, Watchful as fowlers when their game will spring.

The people who are filing for bankruptcy in increasing numbers every year, it's not the poorest. It's not the people at the economic fringes. It's people who worked hard and played by the rules.

Like many another romance, the romance of the family turns sour when the money runs out. If we really cared about families, we would not let 'born again' patriarchs send up moral abstractions as a smokescreen for the scandal of American family economics.