Penelope Spheeris Quotes

What a miserable place a city is for poor people.

There are teachers in the United States who cry in the daytime because they see a child or children who haven't eaten properly, children who haven't used soap in so long.

It stands to reason that unloved and unwanted children are going to get into crime.

There are people in whole parts of our cities who are being totally left behind and disregarded. They are unheard. They are told they are unneeded by this economy. And that extreme poverty breeds conditions for extreme violence.

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.

Our poor children are suffering every day for want of necessities of life…All this is for the love of strong drink.

And if I could get the mayors, and the governors, and the president to look into the eyes of the five-year-olds of this nation, dressed in old raggedy clothes, whose zippers are broken but whose dreams are still alive, they would know what I know-that children need people to fight for them. To stand with them on the most dangerous streets, in the dirtiest hallways, in their darkest hours.

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

A population sodden with drink, steeped in vice, eaten up by every social and physical malady, these are the denizens of darkest England ... the submerged tenth: Is it then beyond the reach of the nine-tenths in the midst of whom they live.

Thousands of American children have only a cell, a hospital bed or a temporary shelter to call home.

We cannot rest while Brazilians are going hungry, while families are living in the streets, while poor children are abandoned to their own fates and while crack and crack dens rule.

What kind of society have we become when children in a great city cannot rely on mothers or fathers for a bowl of cereal in the morning and a brown bag with a sandwich and apple in it for lunch?

They will tell you that the Americans who sleep in the streets and beg for food got there because they’re all lazy or weak of spirit. That the inner-city children who are trapped in dilapidated schools can’t learn and won’t learn and so we should just give up on them entirely. That the innocent people being slaughtered and expelled from their homes half a world away are somebody else’s problem to take care of.

In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic, They beg, their eyes made big by empty staring And only measuring Time , like the blank clock. No, I shall weave no tracery of pen-ornament To make them birds upon my singing tree: Time merely drives these lives which do not live As tides push rotten stuff along the shore.

The poor are always rich in children, and in the dirt and ditches of this street there are groups of them from morning to night, hungry, naked and dirty. Children are the living flowers of the earth, but these had the appearance of flowers that have faded prematurely, because they grew in ground where there was no healthy nourishment.

In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on …. I’m talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange jumpsuit. Where were you when he was 2? Where were you when he was 12 … and where is his father, and why don’t you know where he is?

This statement of fact is an eloquent comment on the apathy with which many people regard the mental and physical health of the rising generation…A woman will lavish love and care, and attention on her pet cat or ‘prize’ poodle, and yet draw her skirts aside from the starving children in the gutter. The mew of the cat and the howl of the dog, to say nothing of the squeal of the ‘tortured rabbit’- that figment of anti-vivisectionist imagination- are far more potent to loosen the purse-strings of the sentimentalists than the wail of children.

I was 17 and living on the streets. I had the education of technically an eighth-grader, but in reality, I had never had a formal education.

No kid is seeking anything when he joins a gang; he's always fleeing something. He's not being pulled; he's being pushed by the circumstances in which he finds himself.

My father and his eight siblings grew up in the kind of poverty that Americans don't like to talk about unless a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina strikes, and then the conversation only lasts as long as the news cycle. His family squatted in shacks. The children scavenged for food.

We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.

South Tel Aviv has turned into the garbage can of the country.

Behind every locked door on Skid Road are a thousand stories.

The jails are full of kids from kids' homes. You're 16 years old, and you're out on the street. How you going to fend for yourself at 16 if you've not had an education? You're going to turn to crime.

They're not going to have a homeless person on a poster representing New York.