Francis Ngannou Quotes

It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for the future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true.

It does seem terribly unfair that such thousands of people are born and live and die with no past to regret and no future to look forward to.

There has been enough suffering in our country, there has been enough of children whose dreams die before they have a chance to grow and there has been enough of our elders who, having served their nation, are forced into indignity in their old age.

What too few people mention when discussing crime is the degree to which concentrated poverty, hopelessness and despair are the chambermaids of violence and incivility.

I have lived poverty. I didn't choose it. No one would choose humiliation, pain, and rage.

A large part of the problem, is that young people are being born into the world and growing up without much hope. And so, they become murderers, they become suicide bombers.

Where the despair of loneliness and poverty haunts every hour, the optimism to embark on new projects cannot find a place to alight on the brain's cortex. Poverty itself is an enormous obstacle to an enlightened and enlightening - not to say healthy - old age.

Before I left Russia in 1999, I was living in a very poor factory town with my family and friends, and nothing was ever going to change.

The last thing the theatre owners wanted was for people who spent $200 to see 'Les Miserables' to come out again and see the real miserable children of America, right there on the sidewalk.

There are thousands of Fosters in Kentucky, who for want of proper education and encouragement, are lost to the world.

What can he do who lacks the necessary work, if he comes to be unemployed? He has nothing but to let himself die of hunger. Then a few phrases of pity will thrown on his cadaver.

You can see what happens when people don't feel they have a chance. You can see the ramifications of that.

In Chicago, a lot of people don't really got nothing to live for. Everybody can't ball. Everybody can't rap. Nobody is really doing those activities. There's nothing to do but the streets.

I was angry because I see other kids with things that I wanted: they had good parents, they had clothes, they always had food and extra money, and I wasn't one of those kids.

I met a number of young, striving, enterprising people in cities like Aligarh and Hubli. But the mental landscape of these towns is out of sync with their reality. Many of these towns are hellholes.

Child poverty is more than an abstract problem to me. It's something I know all too much about.

Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred Bard who had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, Teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man's neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled!

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

An entire content of children growing up without any prospect but poverty.

Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime.

For we went, changing our country more often than our shoes In the class war, despairing When there was only injustice and no resistance

It is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.

Remember 1932. You remember the closed banks and the breadlines and the starvation wages; the foreclosures of homes and farms, and the bankruptcies of business; the Hoovervilles: and the young men and women of the Nation facing a hopeless, jobless, future: the closed factories and mines and mills: the ruined and abandoned farms: the stalled railroads and the empty clocks; the blank despair of a whole Nation—and the utter impotence of the Federal Government.

The awful phantom of the hungry poor.

I wish this Cursed place [Boston] was burned.