Mickey Arthur Quotes

I care about the children of Detroit.

I had a little insight into life that most kids probably didn't have. My mother was a schoolteacher, and my father was a social worker. Through his eyes I saw the underside of society.

People see poverty all around them in India, but they are desensitized or immune to it. I came to the conclusion that poverty is driven by lack of education.

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

First, I was so dazzled and besotted by India. People said the poverty was biblical, and I'm afraid that was my attitude, too. It's terribly easy to get used to someone else's poverty if you're living a middle-class life in it. But after a while, I saw it wasn't possible to accept it, and I also didn't want to.

In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime.

Too much youth, hunger, mission, and talent.

When I was 17, I went to India for six weeks and had what, at the time, was a very challenging trip. You walk down the street and you see lepers and beggars, and there were several of us, a group of Americans. I remember we were just trying to park one night somewhere and people were just sleeping in the parking lot.

In a land of great wealth, families must not live in hopeless poverty. In a land rich in harvest, children just must not go hungry. In a land of healing miracles, neighbors must not suffer and die unattended. In a great land of learning and scholars, young people must be taught to read and write.

Poverty is multidimensional. It extends beyond money incomes to education, health care, political participation and advancement of one's own culture and social organization.

I left college with a deep sense that I needed to understand poverty more.

My mum didn't understand that education was an important thing. She couldn't do my homework with me. I was helping her read stuff. She once brought shaving soap thinking it was whipped cream.

As a young woman, before I had any money, I went backpacking across India, and I was aware of how gritty it could be.

Even if I can take sanitary napkins to 10% of the poor women in India, it will be big achievement.

Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.

When I was giving a lecture in India, the capabilities that I have to be concerned with there, namely the ability of people to go to a school, to be literate, to be able to have a basic health care everywhere, to be able to seek some kind of medical response to one's ailment; these become central issues in the Indian context which they're not in the UK, because you're well beyond that.

Two Chinamen visiting Europe went to the theatre for the first time. One of them occupied himself with trying to understand the theatrical machinery, which he succeeded in doing. The other, despite his ignorance of the language, sought to unravel the meaning of the play. The former is like the astronomer, the latter the philosopher.

You can look at a slum or a peasant village, but it is only by entering into the world - by living in it -that you begin to understand what it is like to be powerless, to be like Christ.

Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student.

Kids suffering, with no opportunities for lack of having their basic human needs [met], like food, health, and education, but at the same time, [it] motivates me to keep fighting for them, for the ones less fortunate.

At last I came to college. I rushed for it with the outstretched arms of youth's aching hunger to give and take of life's deepest, and highest, and I came against the solid wall of the well-fed, well-dressed world - the frigid whitewashed wall of cleanliness. ... How I pinched, and scraped, and starved myself, to save enough to come to college! Every cent of the tuition fee I paid was drops of sweat and blood from underpaid laundry work. And what did I get for it? A crushed spirit, a broken heart, a stinging sense of poverty that I never felt before.

If I'm an advocate for anything, it's to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else's shoes or at least eat their food, it's a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.

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?"

Education gives sobriety to the young, comfort to the old, riches to the poor and is an ornament to the rich.

When I first went to Europe, I thought I was going to move there. I was making plans to move to the south of Spain. It's such a cute, innocent thought. I think we all go through it.