Marcus Samuelsson Quotes

It's very difficult when you have $1.50 per day to spend on food and drink, but for people who live this reality, that money also has to cover medical expenses and education, fuel and shelter - sometimes for an entire family.

Why should Americans go on with their lives as normal, worrying about calories and hair loss, while other people are worrying about where they are going to get their next piece of bread?

I understand human needs. I grew up where far too many people lived day to day without elemental needs like food and shelter.

I've lived places these guys can't defecate in.

No man can live well, or indeed live at all, unless he be provided with necessaries.

When a poor man has bread, he has no salt, and when he has salt, he has no bread. If he has some seasoning he has no meat. If he has some meat, he has no seasoning.

I don't just live in a bubble in Los Angeles. I'm on the road all the time. I say hello to people everywhere. That way, you get to see what despair is around the holidays. People are making terrible choices: Do I have heat in the winter or food on the table? Decisions between filling the gas tank or buying a gift for a kid.

Venezuelans live on 3 dollars a month. That's a tragedy. That is impossible to survive under these conditions.

Of course, we all need to have basic necessities met, such as good health care, good food, good education and good housing. But what is good? Having too much is bad, as having too little is also bad.

Give to a being the useless, and deprive him of the needful, and you have the gamin.

Men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries.

There were so many lean years. A lot of lean years.

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

Poverty can teach lessons that privilege cannot.

Charles Wyly was born Oct 13, 1933, in Lake Providence, La., and for a period lived with his family in a shack without electricity or plumbing.

A hungry man is not a free man.

No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses.

There is nothing good to be had in the country, or if there is, they will not let you have it.

The stories my pupils told me were astonishing. One told how he had witnessed his cousin being shot in the back five times; another how his parents had died of AIDS. Another said that he'd probably been to more funerals than parties in his young life. For me - someone who had had an idyllic, happy childhood - this was staggering.

I grew up poor in India, and there were days when we struggled to find food and other basic necessities. Our mother worked odds and ends jobs to keep the family together and educate us.

If you look at the human condition today, not everyone is well fed, has access to good medical care, or the physical basics that provide for a healthy and a happy life.

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!

The simple facts of Chadian life - what it takes to survive in that kind of climate with nothing but a hut and some animals - stunned me. And this made me realize, perhaps for the first time, how easy my life was compared to those of people in less privileged societies.

Our pleasures were simple - they included survival.

Being poor sucks... It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month.