Thiruvalluvar Quotes

Vast areas are witness to the struggles of destitute populations trying to survive under unlivable conditions.

The poor prey on one another because their lives offer no hope and communicate the tragic message to these human beings that they have no possibility to attain a decent standard of living.

I never thought it was fair for an 8-year-old child not to be able to afford shoes, or to wander the streets having to beg for money. To know that child's joy would end soon, when they realised there was no future.

Unemployment is a great tragedy. The man who goes about hopelessly seeking work in order to earn bread for his children is a living reproach to civilization.

Desperation is a fact of life in many poor, overcrowded countries.

I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human being become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of respectability at a commensurate speed.

People have nothing to lose. Government has stripped them of their dignity and their respect.

No agitation for political reforms could be carried on by a plague-stricken and starving people. Food was what they needed and most urgently demanded. The political argument died away, drowned in cries and petitions for relief, lost in weepings and wailings for the victims who were perishing in hundreds by the roadsides, in the fields, and in their bare and empty houses.

The misery of the people here is very great, the beggars innumerable and increasing everyday…One half of the people in Ireland eat neither bread nor flesh for one half of the year, nor wear Shoes or Stockings; your Hogs in England and Essex Calves lie and live better than they.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

We are not expecting Utopia here on this earth. But God meant things to be much easier than we have made them. A man has a natural right to food, clothing, and shelter. A certain amount of goods is necessary to lead a good life.

I have seen the Indian in his forests and the negro in his chains, and thought as I contemplated their pitiable condition, that I saw the very extreme of human wretchedness, but I did not then know the condition of unfortunate Ireland …. In all countries, more or less, paupers may be discovered but an entire nation of paupers is what never was seen till it was shown in Ireland. The misery of Ireland descends to degrees unknown elsewhere.

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.

I cannot be a materialist - but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicious luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy debauchery - such suffering, such dreadful suffering - and shall the short years of Christ's mission atone for it all?

I avoid going through places where there's too much poverty.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people.

But what is the use of preaching the Gospel to men whose whole attention is concentrated upon a mad, desperate struggle to keep themselves alive?

There's something very visceral about watching people beg for money. It's powerful.

How can a man help breaking the law when he don't have money to live on?

Are some women and children going to die? Yeah. But it's doing the right thing. You got money, you sit around talking about peace. People who don't have money need some help.

Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.

My parents were children during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it scarred them. Especially my father, who saw destitution in his Brooklyn, New York neighborhood; adults standing in so called 'bread lines,' children begging in the streets.

At the same, we need to remain sensitive to the reality that we are still an African society in which the majority of the people and communities live under severe deprivations and afflictions that are no fault of theirs.

Hundreds of millions of human beings on our planet increasingly suffer from unemployment, poverty, hunger, and the destruction of their families.