Marquis de Custine Quotes

Whatever people's backgrounds or values, a society where more and more people face a daily struggle to house, clothe and even feed themselves and their families cannot possibly be the answer.

You leave the States, and you see people have bigger problems than you, much worse problems than you.

Mexico has not achieved the advances that the population demands or deserves.

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

It's such a different spectrum of tragedies when you talk to people in developing countries.

We must embark on a bold new program for ... the improvement and growth of undeveloped areas. More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery .... For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of these people.

How can you compare the the masses of Western Europe with our people—so patient, so accustomed to privation?

In the developed world, income inequality within the country is the most important determinant of health standards and life expectancy.

The more you improve the condition of these people, the more you cultivate their minds, the more miserable you make them in their present state.

There is no amount of money I can make which could buffer my daughter from the horrors that will explode in our society if we do not address the huge amount of suffering in our midst.

Many people today in the developed countries are so far removed from poverty and suffering and starvation that they lack empathy for the sufferings of others.

It’s scandalous when one thinks about the people who live in a world in which they need not be hungry, in which they need not die without medical care, in which they need not be illiterate, they need not feel hopeless and miserable so much of the time, and yet they are.

I often wonder how we can make the more fortunate in this country fully aware of the fact that the problem of the unemployed is not a mechanical one. It is a problem alive and throbbing with human pain.

That amid our highest civilization men faint and die with want is not due to the niggardliness of nature, but to the injustice of man.

The tragedy of civil wars in countries like Angola and Mozambique is that they left many civilians maimed. Poverty is the reason HIV/AIDS spread so rapidly in the African townships and slums. Poverty is the real killer.

Today I see more clearly than yesterday that the back of the problem of race and color lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellow men.

We live in a country [USA] where the belief is that anyone can succeed, but for so many here, and for the majority of the world, that's not the case. In many parts of the world, women and poor people are at a huge disadvantage - certain rights and protections don't exist, and they don't have the chance of upward mobility.

Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soulless army of human prey.

There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery

Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound, or smell of it

Poverty is the fundamental cause of most of the physical, moral and economic ills of humanity.

We live in the richest country in the world. There's plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want. And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle - the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start? There are corporations worth billions of dollars - and hundreds of thousands of people who don't get to eat.

Get to know the poor in your country. Love them. Serve them.

Anyway, what is a country? When people say, "Tell me about India," I say, "Which India?.... The land of poetry and mad rebellion? The one that produces haunting music and exquisite textiles? The one that invented the caste system and celebrates the genocide of Muslims and Sikhs and the lynching of Dalits? The country of dollar billionaires? Or the one in which 800 million live on less than half-a-dollar a day? Which India?"

The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.