Frank McCourt Quotes

If someone is poor in India, they should be able to watch the same films as rich people.

Poverty may be the mother of crime, but lack of good sense is the father.

Nothing is sadder than having worldly standards without worldly means.

America is supposed to be given over to ugliness. There are a good many ugly things there and the ugliest are the most pretentious.

Poverty is a veil that obscures the face of greatness. An appeal is a mask covering the face of tribulation.

I came from a rural background, and I didn't come in contact with a lot of wealthy people.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

If everybody lives in the same way, there's something almost narcotizing about it, but the true misery of economic class difference is knowing that you can't have what somebody else does.

The beggar is the only person in the universe not obliged to study appearance.

This generation has given up on growth. They're just hoping for survival.

I know that a man who shows me his wealth is like the beggar who shows me his poverty; they are both looking for alms from me, the rich man for the alms of my envy, the poor man for the alms of my guilt.

In America it's good to show people you are fine, you're healthy, you're sporty, you're happy to do things, to live. And in France it's more like you don't have to show you have success.

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.

It is a mistake to condemn a horse for being slim and to condemn a capable person for being poor.

Poverty violates core American values. It challenges the American dream’s promise of prosperity for anyone who works hard, a faith central to the national ethic.

I was 15 when my family moved to Jidda from Britain in 1982. Living in Saudi Arabia was such a shock to my system that I like to say I was traumatized into feminism.

We were poor. My mother got our clothes out of the free box at the church, you know? So much of when you're a kid is about relating about what you watch on TV. And who's got these cooler shoes, and 'Let's trade lunches.' And I was just like, 'I don't have a television. I have a rock and a piece of tofu.'

I thought everything would be different in America. It wasn't.

I wanted to do comedy because I left Malaysia and went to America. I got bitten by the Western, idealist, opinionated, democracy bug.

I grew up in a close-knit community where I was expected to excel, and it was a different experience when I got to the university. There were very few students of color, and those numbers were extremely low in the school of engineering.

My dad looked like Errol Flynn, and I think my mom thought she was moving into a hacienda, but they lived on a dirt street in Tijuana, a house jammed with relatives, nobody speaking English. She didn't know a word of Spanish. She grew up well and was appalled and humiliated, terrified of anyone ethnic.

It's one of the central problems of American culture: telling you if you're younger, more beautiful, more famous, whatever, that then you'll be happy.

I am American. If you drop me in Seoul, I don't think I'm going to thrive there.

The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.

The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.