Louis-Ferdinand Celine Quotes

The poor man looks upon the law as an enemy, not as a friend. For him, the law is always taking something away.

I'd been in Sacramento a day and already noticed the pervasiveness of its homeless problem. The city seemed like California without the masks or pretense: a place where dreams were occasionally made but mostly torn apart.

There is nothing good to be had in the country, or if there is, they will not let you have it.

I had a very comfortable life, but there were people who spent their life in prison, whose families were destroyed.

Poverty is the mother of crime.

The law was made for one thing alone, for the exploitation of those who don't understand it, or are prevented by naked misery from obeying it.

We have ministers who are incapable of doing what has been ordered from above because there is no follow up, because there are no consequences. If you are poor man and you steal, your hand is cut off after three offences. But if you are a rich man, nobody will say anything to you.

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime - namely, repressive justice.

The big thieves hang the little ones.

Those responsible for social insecurity will receive harsher punishment

How fared the Irish artisan—how fared the Irish peasant? Where one pined, as he yet pines, in your beggared cities, the other starves, upon your fruitful soil.

There is scarce a poor man in England of forty years of age, I will venture to say who has not in some part of his life felt himself most cruelly oppressed by this ill-contrived law of settlement.

Our sweat and our blood have fallen on this land to make other men rich. The pilgrimage is a witness to the suffering we have seen for generations

A large portion of pauperism and misery is really attributable to bad government and injustice.

The rich rob the poor, and the poor rob one another.

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

The amount of suffering I've seen is beyond belief. The amount of inequality is beyond belief.

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.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

To think, I have had more than 60 years of hard struggle for a little liberty, and then to die without it seems so cruel.

If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.

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.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

Poverty can teach lessons that privilege cannot.