Cesar Chavez Quotes

Being poor is people wondering why you didn't leave.

The greatest hardship of poverty is that it tends to make men ridiculous.

I was born illegitimately and almost immediately, as I understand it, placed in an orphanage. So my very earliest memories were in an orphanage. It was the tag end of the Great Depression when I was born. People were desperately poor.

It is easy to say that poverty is no crime .... It is a blunder though, and is punished ... A poor man is despised the whole world over.

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

In a way, no one's harder on the poor than the poor themselves.

People who are living in economic struggle are more than their circumstances. They're majestic and creative and beautiful.

Poverty is bitter, but it has no harder pang than that it makes men ridiculous.

Democracy holds little appeal for people who are struggling to survive.

Simply put, unsustainable debt is helping to keep too many poor countries and poor people in poverty.

Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the beggar's robes, and graceful insignia of his profession, his tenure, his full dress, the suit in which he is expected to show himself in public.

Homeless people bear God's image too.

The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.

People have to struggle to live and, frequently, to live in an undignified way. One cause of this situation, in my opinion, is in the our relationship with money, and our acceptance of its power over ourselves and our society.

Nothing is more inspiring to see how poor and suffering people, living under conditions incomparably worse than we endure, continue quietly and unpretentiously with courageous and committed struggle for justice and dignity.

I went almost naked to see that my mother was kept decent and treated as a human being for the first time in all of her life.

The worst thing about poverty is not the actual living of it, but the shame of it.

...poor people are just as human as anyone else. They have just as much potential as anyone.

Some people think that poor people are lazy. Actually, it takes a lot of work to survive when you are dirt-poor.

Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.

You said, 'How is it possible for democracy to work with an illiterate people who are dying of hunger?' But with that people we made a democracy work.

While you can say that the problem of the middle class in the rich countries is too much globalization, the problem of the people who are very poor is really that they are not included in globalization. For them, the success of their own countries at becoming part of this international division of labor would be good news.

There is no worse material poverty, I am keen to stress, than the poverty which prevents people from earning their bread and deprives them of the dignity of work.

When the dignity of one person is denied, all of us are denied.

Poverty breeds a lot of things. When people are desperate and trying to survive, they do drastic things.