In really bad times, the hungriest would gather at his door at nightfall, vying for the chance to earn a few coins to feed their families by selling their bodies. Had I been older when my father died, I might have been among them. Instead I learned to hunt.
I spent a lot of time behind the Iron Curtain, and their cars were abysmal.
Desperation is a fact of life in many poor, overcrowded countries.
When I was a kid, nobody in my family had a car. And I didn't have many toys. The only toys I had were the ones I would steal.
I have been down and out, living in Brooklyn, no money even for a subway, no food whatsoever. Like, I remember just sitting in my room all day - even my television wasn't working!
Poverty, for me, is synonymous with degradation.
When a poor man has bread, he has no salt, and when he has salt, he has no bread. If he has some seasoning he has no meat. If he has some meat, he has no seasoning.
Poverty is not a disgrace, but it's terribly inconvenient.
It is a kind of blindness--poverty. We can only grope through life when we are poor, hitting and maiming ourselves against every angle.
What hurts me most is poverty, and that's what led me to become a rebel.
An admiral without ships, a hand without fingers, in service of a king without a throne. Is this a knight who comes before us, or the answer to a child's riddle?
There are just way too many people suffering out there.
Ne'er ask me what raiment I'll wear, for I have no more doublets than backs, no more stockings than legs, nor no more shoes than feet--nay, sometime more feet than shoes, or such shoes as my toes look through the overleather.
Homelessness is like public education - something that for far too long we haven't put the resources or love or attention to.
What, other than injustice, could be the reason that the displaced citizens of New Orleans cannot be accommodated by the richest nation in the world?
After joining as a youth trainee at 16 from school, in my first two or three years the club was on a financial downward spiral and there was none of the new sparkling kit and the sparkling conditions that the kids get now.
No one ever has the resources they need.
Too many children are being parked in substandard day care with workers who make little more than a parking attendant.
The poorest parts of the world are by and large the places in which one can best view the worst of medicine and not because doctors in these countries have different ideas about what constitutes modern medicine. It's the system and its limitations that are to blame.
If we take a hard look at what poverty is, its nature, it's not pretty - it's full of trauma.
In Chicago, a lot of people don't really got nothing to live for. Everybody can't ball. Everybody can't rap. Nobody is really doing those activities. There's nothing to do but the streets.
There's not a lot of hope coming from the inner city.
People try not to think about what's going on in sub-Saharan Africa. They edit it out of their daily lives. Especially Americans. We prefer a fantasy version of Africa.
I found myself without money, without credit, without army, without experience and knowledge of my own and finally, also without any counsel because each one of them at first wanted to wait and see how things would develop.
If you were the poor, suffering was your currency.
