Destitution Quotes

The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America. Work must be found for able-bodied but destitute workers. The Federal Government must and shall quit this business of relief.

All the principal towns are sadly decayed, and instead of finding every mortal employed, you meet with multitudes of poor creatures who are starving in idleness.

Poverty, for me, is synonymous with degradation.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

The poorest man in the world is a man without a dream.

A wandering family [in Ireland] will fix themselves under a dry bank and with a few sticks, furze, fern, etc,, make up a hovel much worse than an English pigsty, and support themselves how they can by work, begging, and stealing.

That our judges, counts, or envoys shall not have a right to extort payment of the remitted fine, on their own behalf, from those destitute persons to whom the emperor has, in his mercy, forgiven what they ought to pay by reason of his balm

The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede.

Poverty palls the most generous spirits; it cows industry, and casts resolution itself into despair.

... the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be.

If Pride leads the Van, Beggary brings up the Rear.

The citizens were so destitute that all the tropical fish in the city’s aquarium were devoured and even respectable women were driven to prostitution.

Vast areas are witness to the struggles of destitute populations trying to survive under unlivable conditions.

In England, the population explosion can be linked very clearly with the enclosure of the commons that uprooted the peasants from their land. In India, it was the same thing: the population increased at the end of the 18th century when the British took over and Indian lands were colonized. Instead of the land feeding Indian people it started to feed the British empire. So we had destitution. Destitute people who don't have their own land to feed themselves can only feed themselves by having larger numbers, therefore they multiply. It's the rational response of a dispossessed people.

We must preserve not only the bodies of the unemployed from destitution but also their self-respect, their self-reliance, and courage and determination.

If you were the poor, suffering was your currency.

Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of [Muslim] rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound.

I didn't have a dollar to my name in 2006.

Property is not the sacred right. When a rich man becomes poor it is a misfortune, it is not a moral evil. When a poor man becomes destitute, it is a moral evil, teeming with consequences and injurious to society and morality.

But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution.

Feel like a broke-down engine, ain't got no drivin' wheel. You all been down and lonesome, you know just how a poor man feels.

Mike Webster lost all his money or, maybe, gave it away. He forgot. A lot of lawsuits. Mike Webster forgot how to eat, too. Soon, Mike Webster was homeless, living in a truck, one of its windows replaced with a garbage bag and tape.

Economic progress and justice do not consist in superbly equalized destitution, but in the constant creation of more and more goods and services, of more and more wealth and income to be shared.

The society of Christendom and especially of Western Christendom up to the explosion, which we call the Reformation, had been a society of owners: a Proprietarial Society. It was one in which there remained strong bonds between one class and another, and in which there was a hierarchy of superior and inferior, but not, in the main, a distinction between a restricted body of possessors and a main body of destitute at the mercy of the possessors, such as our society has become.

But the most horrible spot .... lies....immediately south west of Oxford Road and is known as Little Ireland. The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench....must surely have reached the lowest stage of humanity.