Jules Feiffer Quotes

You don't have to be impoverished to understand poverty.

We decided in the mid-1960s that all poor people are the same: they are all poor. We know they're poor because we have defined a poverty line, and they're all underneath it.

I come from a lower-middle-class family and used to stay in a housing board colony.

I do think it's important that we experiment with new vocabularies. That new words help us conceptualize our social existence in a different way.

Poverty consist in feeling poor.

But very early in life I became part of the majority culture and now don't think of myself as a minority. Yet the university said I was one. Anybody who has met a real minority - in the economic sense, not the numerical sense - would understand how ridiculous it is to describe a young man who is already at the university, already well into his studies in Italian and English Renaissance literature, as a minority.

I'm the middle-class kid; it doesn't sound exciting, but a lot of my audience is middle-class kids.

Pale and pinched-up faces hovered about the windows where was tempting food; hungry eyes wandered over the profusion guarded by one thin sheet of brittle glass--an iron wall to them; half-naked shivering figures stopped to gaze at Chinese shawls and golden stuffs of India.

I can tell you I'm pretty middle-class.

Sometimes, when you grow up in one of these poverty-stricken neighborhoods where the educational system isn't the best, you don't realize that you have any choices.

Poverty snatches the reins out of the hand of piety.

And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty.

I am sure that hon. members will realize that I am not drawing on my imagination when I state that last fall there were children going to school in Saskatchewan with only sacking wrapped around their feet. We have gone into homes and found mothers and children lying on piles of bedding in the corner; they did not have the proper bedding equipment or the proper clothing to meet the rigours of a very cold winter.

In one important respect a man is fortunate in being poor. His responsibility to God is so much the less

To be able to proclaim the Good News to the poor we must know what is poverty.

Americans ... do not naturally apply the term "bourgeois" to themselves, or to anyone else for that matter. They do like to call themselves middle class, but that does not carry with it any determinate spiritual content. ... The term "middle class" does not have any of the many opposites that bourgeois has, such as aristocrat, saint, hero, or artist - all good.

Poverty is just a state of mind.

Poverty often deprives a man of all spirit and virtue; it is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.

Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known to be poor that is the sting.

To go from "gnarly" to "literally," that shows I'm growing up, right?

Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.

Being Black and poor is, I think, radically different from being anything else and poor. Poor, to most Blacks, is a state of mind. Those who accept it are poor; those who struggle are middle class.

We grew up poor, very poor, but I am very proud of where I come from.

If you think about portraying Americans, for example, in a Russian film, it all depends on where the American is from, if they went to school or not, and if they're well-educated or not. Is it an American from Texas, or an American from Brooklyn? Things would change with the vocabulary and the accent.

Poverty - the one thing money can't buy