Jeanne Marie Laskas Quotes

In Hanover Park they highlighted the terrible plight of backyard dwellers and the fact that year after year nothing has been done to help you: the hope and despair you all live with every day.

I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scantiness of my resources and the difficulty of my life... I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a vagabond.

I did everything to get food. I have stolen for food. I have jumped in huge garbage bins with maggots for food. I have befriended people in the neighborhood who I knew had mothers who cooked three meals a day for food, and I sacrificed a childhood for food and grew up in immense shame.

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.

Aspiring beggary is wretchedness itself.

Like ice beneath the sun's rays - to such poverty did he fall...his fortune melted to water.

I may not remember the name of a book's author, but let it be clear, what I will not forget is the violence, the poverty and the desperation that Mexico is living through.

We hate our squalor.

I want to set up orphanages for underprivileged and abused children.

What in the name of humanity is to become of them—where are they to go?

If we are to save our children then we must become people they will look up to. Children need heroes now more than ever because the poor children of this nation live with monsters every day. Monsters deprive them of heat in the winter, they don't fix their sinks and toilets, they let garbage pile up in their hallways, they kick them out of their homes, they beat them, shoot them, stab them-sometimes to death-they rape their bodies and their minds. Sometimes they lurk under the stairs. They scuttle around in the dark; you hear them in the walls gnawing, squeaking, occasionally biting a little finger.

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

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.

Whole families used to starve in their cabins without their plight being discovered until the stench of their decaying corpses attracted notice.

One bright sunny morning In the shadow of the steeple By the Relief Office I saw my people-- As they stood hungry I stood there wondering If God blessed America for me.

The awful phantom of the hungry poor.

A wandering family [in Ireland] will fix themselves under a dry bank and with a few sticks, furze, fern, etc,, make up a hovel much worse than an English pigsty, and support themselves how they can by work, begging, and stealing.

A scene of misery and gloomy despair of a community of people who have been plunged abruptly from prosperity to a complete want of the most essential things of life.

You see one eviction, and you're overcome, but then there's another one and another one and another one.

It's hunger. It's homelessness, often. It's underfunded, under-resourced schools. It's abuse beyond the chilling. It's having overwhelmed parents and caregivers. Those are the things that young people are struggling with beyond our view.

If you just catalog the effects eviction has on people's live and neighborhoods, it's pretty troubling.

We were below welfare. We begged from people on welfare. My father tried to repair our shoes with pieces of bicycle tires.

Like the suffering child, gang members act out of their despair, and their actions are all the more alarming now for our not having heeded their cry long ago. The shortsighted neglect that keeps us locked up in our outrage has also kept us from viable solutions.

Not having a roof over your head at night must be frightening, cold, lonely and depressing. To be seriously ill as well must be beyond upsetting.

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.