Janine di Giovanni Quotes

This America has been the country of greed rather than the country of need.

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.

I think of myself as quite a confused kind of person, because I think there's so many great things about the world, but there are so many awful things too. I feel very guilty a lot of the time about enjoying my life so much when there are people living in such misery.

Being able to travel and see the world really makes me appreciate the blessings in my life. There are so many people that will never get a chance to see some of the things that I've seen during my travels. I'll never take that for granted.

The more I speak and travel, I realize I don't have it that bad. There are so many people that have it so much worse than I do.

You think we got it bad in Omaha, or in any city in the United States, and then you go to a different country and you see how bad they got it. You give those people a balloon and they'll cherish it like you gave them a chunk of gold.

A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

Tabloid discussion of bad children always blames baby-boomer liberals, careerist mothers and fashion-crazed Nathan Barley types who think it's all enormously funny. But the centre-leftish psycho-thinker Oliver James says it's all down to the Thatcher-and-after culture of turbo-capitalism, making people acquisitive and unsatisfied.

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

Do I wake up every day and thank God that I live in 21st-century Britain? Of course not. But from time to time, I recognise it as an unfathomable privilege.

You forget that you do choose your life and there are so many things to be grateful for and I feel like society has gotten to that point where we're always looking for the next and the better and we lose sight of what's actually in front of us.

Places like India can give you a real culture shock because of the poverty you see, and it brings you up sharply.

In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice.

one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.

It is wrong to say God made rich and poor; He made only male and female

One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged.

All Reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.

You are exacerbating inequality rather than opening up opportunity.

However widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel everyone else in the accumulation of goods.

People who are underprivileged have more to grieve and have more to overcome.

I want to be there for all those who are left behind in this world, whether it's because they are born poor, born a woman, or born in an area affected by devastation.

There is a lot more opportunity now, and I welcome all the conversations we are having about diversity, about women and about class... I come from a very working-class background, and I think the class thing is still probably more tricky.

I don't mind America becoming a Third World country. The weather is better in the Third World than it is where I live in New Hampshire. And household help will be much cheaper.

We're not all Kim Kardashian. We can't have $15,000 from head to toe every single day.

A lot of people have it tougher than I do.