Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
How is it possible that the poorer classes can remain healthy and have a reasonable expectation of life under such conditions? What can one expect but that they should suffer from continual outbreaks of epidemics and an excessively low expectation of life? The physical condition of the workers shows a progressive deterioration.
You and I can be busy, and we take a vacation from work. You can't take a break from being poor. You can't say, 'Hey I've had enough of worrying about money, I'm just going to be rich for a couple of weeks until I've recovered.'
Death is easier than a wretched life; and better never to have born than to live and fare badly.
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.
What everyone has always wanted in this country, what most came here for, was to get away from all those others who smell bad, are sleeping in a shanty, and are eating fatback and are going to loaf tomorrow because there is no job to go to.
My mother paid eight dollars a month for rent. When she had it. Mostly we were evicted, because she couldnt afford to pay the eight dollars a month.
Dyin' ain't much of a living, boy.
Half the people of the world are living on less than $2 a day.
If you are poor, you are not likely to live long.
People who didn't know the depression just don't know what being poor means.
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.
An ill life will effectually drown the voice of the most eloquent ministry.
We have got some mountains to move. Three billion people - half of God's children - are living on less than $2 a day.
Statistically, a “normal” human being in today’s world is poor, lives in oppressive physical, social, and political conditions, and is ruled by unresponsive and corrupt government.
Where do people earn the Per Capita Income? More than one poor starving soul would like to know. In our countries, numbers live better than people. How many people prosper in times of prosperity? How many people find their lives developed by development?
I gained direct knowledge of the life of the poor in big towns: I have lived the narrowing mechanism of its conditioning and feared it.
In the north we could not hope to keep the worst and poorest servant for a single day in the wretched discomfort in which our negro servants are forced habitually to live.
It would be impossible adequately to describe the privations which they [the Irish poor] habitually and silently endure…. In many districts, there only food is the potato, their only beverage, water … their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather … a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury … and nearby it all, their pig and manure heap constitute their only property.
A rich man's body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. ''Ours'' is different. My father's spine was a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells; the clavicle curved around his neck in high relief, like a dog's collar; cuts and nicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist, reaching down below his hip bones into his buttocks. The story of a poor man's life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.
So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in.
In a home where there are too many children in proportion to the living space, the air and sunlight, the children are usually overcrowded and underfed. They are a constant burden on their mother's overtaxed strength and the father's earning capacity. Such homes cannot be gardens in any sense of the word.
The real slums are another matter. The bad parts of Tondo are as bad as any place I've seen, ancient, filthy houses swarmed with the poor and stinking of sewage and trash. But there are worse parts - squatter areas where people live under cardboard, in shipping crates, behind tacked-up newspapers. Dad would march you straight to the basement with a hairbrush in his hand if he caught you keeping your hamster cage like this.
I live in Brick Towers, a public housing project in Newark's Central Ward. I moved in when the projects were privately owned by a man who the residents and I believed was a grade A slumlord.
In the Third World, there are 1.3 billion poor people. In other words, one out of every three inhabitants lives in poverty.
