Langston Hughes Quotes

Poverty, for me, is synonymous with degradation.

I grew up in an underprivileged home.

For a long time, I couldn't even afford food and clothing. I climbed from the very bottom of the society.

I grew up in a council house in a poor Scottish town. I came of age during the recession of the mid-1980s when unemployment in my area reached 40 per cent.

It's a Cyprus of misery and soup kitchens and a state which cannot meet basic obligations. It can only cause me grief.

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.

Gordon Ramsay grew up in a tourist town, Stratford-Upon-Avon, but in a part tourists don't visit - a council estate: a concrete bunker subsidized by the local government, synonymous with deprivation and blight.

Like a lot of black people, I grew up straight po'. Wasn't no question about whether we was po', either. If you really wanted to know, all you had to do was look in our refrigerator.

Where is there beauty when you see deprivation and starvation?

I don't really believe in the myth of being poor but happy. At the poorest times in my life, I wasn't happy. I was just hungry.

Poverty must have many satisfactions, else there would not be so many poor people.

In 1843, everybody was hungry, unemployed, and conditions were very bad.

No city in Italy contains so many miserable beggars, and no town in the world so many blind.

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

How miserable that man is that Governes a People where six parts of seven at least are Poor, Endebted Discontented and Armed.

Most of the misery and poverty in the world is due to bad government.

There never yet was, and never will be, a nation permanently great, consisting, for the greater part, of wretched and miserable families.

I go home every day, and my mum still lives in the same house. It's not one of the most affluent areas of Liverpool - some may say it's deprived - but we have an abundance of love and support.

I grew up on Section 8 housing, food stamps, welfare, and dealing with social services. I never had a Christmas. I never had a birthday.

I was in Vancouver, and I was in what I was told was the poorest neighborhood in North America - which I find very hard to believe because has anyone here ever been to Detroit?

Poverty often deprives a man of all spirit and virtue; it is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.

Three were the fates. Poverty that chains; gray drudgery that grinds the hope away, and gaping ignorance that starves the soul.

A world of little cares is continually arising, which busy or affluent life knows nothing of, to open the first door to distress. Hunger is not among the postponable wants; and a day, even a few hours, in such a condition is often the crisis of a life of ruin.

Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soulless army of human prey.

By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men.