James Boswell Quotes

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

What is so striking about Liberia is that in a place where there is so much to be done, I have never seen so many people with nothing to do.

Remember 1932. You remember the closed banks and the breadlines and the starvation wages; the foreclosures of homes and farms, and the bankruptcies of business; the Hoovervilles: and the young men and women of the Nation facing a hopeless, jobless, future: the closed factories and mines and mills: the ruined and abandoned farms: the stalled railroads and the empty clocks; the blank despair of a whole Nation—and the utter impotence of the Federal Government.

Whole families used to starve in their cabins without their plight being discovered until the stench of their decaying corpses attracted notice.

What can he do who lacks the necessary work, if he comes to be unemployed? He has nothing but to let himself die of hunger. Then a few phrases of pity will thrown on his cadaver.

A scene of misery and gloomy despair of a community of people who have been plunged abruptly from prosperity to a complete want of the most essential things of life.

And one thing to be remembered: it is not that the people who are poor, starving, become frustrated with life - no. They cannot become frustrated. They have not lived yet - how can they be frustrated? They have hopes. A poor man always has hopes that something is going to happen - if not today then tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow; if not in this life then in the next life.

We are lost, lost,' said Gollum. 'No name, no business, no Precious, nothing. Only empty. Only hungry; yes, we are hungry. A few little fishes, nasty bony little fishes, for a poor creature, and they say death. So wise they are; so just, so very just

Loneliness and hunger were my fortunes of creation.

I'd met a woman and I got married, but the money ran out right away. I hadn't had a job for seven months, and it just came over me that I was never going to work again. It hit me.

I have seen what the days of tribulation can do to people. I have seen hunger stalk the streets of Europe. I have witnessed the appalling, emaciated shadows of human figures. I have seen women and children scavenge army garbage dumps for scraps of food. Those scenes and nameless faces cannot be erased from my memory.

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

I mean that at least 80% of the Russian people feel destitute. It's the people who had their past and future taken from them - they don't get paid - many of them face a wall. They have nowhere to go.

His eyes so dim, so wasted each limb, that, heedless of grammar, they all cried, that's him!

There was a point when I almost gave up. I couldn't feed myself. I couldn't feed my pets.

My background is degradation and sloth, mostly.

An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.

The awful phantom of the hungry poor.

From these cities they would go on again, by the roads of vines and olives, through squalid villages, where there was not a hovel without a gap in its filthy walls, not a window with a whole inch of glass or paper; where there seemed to be nothing to support life, nothing to eat, nothing to make, nothing to grow, nothing to hope, nothing to do but die.

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!

At a certain depth of distress, the poor, in their stupor, groan no longer over evil, and are no longer thankful for good.

Aspiring beggary is wretchedness itself.

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down, Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town.

I don't care if I starve.

If beggars do not hate the rest of us, they are even more abject than I had imagined.