Carmen Yulín Cruz Quotes

I know what it means to go to the stream to fetch water... what it means when people are poor and don't have enough to eat. It's not enough to say you know about poverty. You have to live it.

Gentlemen, I speak to you for the miners' families... The little children are gathered around a bare table without anything to eat. They are not asking for a $100,000 yacht like yours, Mr.______..." (here, he would gesture with his cigar toward an operator), "...or for a Rolls-Royce limousine like yours, Mr. _____..." (staring at another operator). They are asking only for a slim crust of bread.

There are just way too many people suffering out there.

When I read in newspapers that farmers are dying because of water shortage, I felt deeply pained that we have best of everything, yet we complain so much, whereas there are people who do not even have access to basic necessities of life.

In Hanover Park they highlighted the terrible plight of backyard dwellers and the fact that year after year nothing has been done to help you: the hope and despair you all live with every day.

There's this huge number of desperate people.

I have said democracy and freedom do not work too well if you are hungry, if you are starving.

To see those babies with no food for three of four days, old people sitting in the hot sun, when you see these poor people, you cannot help but being compassionate or affected.

Poverty is often off the beaten track. It always has been.

If the wealth of the whole world is, as you say, "pre-eminently and beneficially the nation's wealth," how is it that thousands of able-bodied, willing, earnest men and women are suffering the pangs of hunger? We may boast of our wealth and civilization, but to the hungry man and woman and child our progress is a hollow mockery, our civilization a sham, and our "national wealth" a chimera.

There is despair, Mr President, in the faces of those you do not see; in the places that you do not visit.

What poor people go through, it's amazing they don't do more violent things! If they'd just give you a little dignity, it might help you stand it better. They suffer no heat, no electricity, while you're working, but then you've got to face all the insults, too.

It has been tough when I have been with the national team and we have gone to play in some of the poorer areas in Brazil. You see people come and watch us train or play a match, and then you know some of them are going home with no food on the plate.

I don't believe watching dreams but like to stick to reality. Reality is all about flood, hunger, illness.

I think it's criminal the way poverty is allowed to flourish.

Poverty ennobles no one; it brutalizes common people and makes them hungry and old.

Hunger is an altogether fit companion for the idle man.

Give to a being the useless, and deprive him of the needful, and you have the gamin.

Oh Lord, are there really people starving still?

There are degrees of happiness. You go from one to the other and then back again. It's hard to be completely happy when those around us are suffering and groaning from hunger.

It's hard to get people to empathize with the poor. You can get some people to sympathize with the poor, but to empathize is actually very hard, because most people are not poor. I realized that scarcity gives you a thread.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

I travel around the world, experiencing every language, every religion... some places where there's just no reason to smile, because their lives are so difficult.

If the market is left to sort matters out, social injustice will be heightened and suffering in the community will grow with the neglect the market fosters.

It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother's lips to kiss you.