William Faulkner Quotes

When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exposed.

So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.

The world remains beset by so much human suffering, poverty and deprivation. It is in your hands to make of our world a better one for all, especially the poor, vulnerable and marginalised.

We are, all of us, poor wretches, and those who prefer not to understand this are even worse off than the rest of us.

I didn’t create poverty. This church didn’t create poverty. Poverty is not an issue, human suffering is not an issue at all, they were there before the creation of mankind.

The issue of poverty is not a statistical issue. It is a human issue.

I am no metaphysician, no philosopher, nay, no saint. But I am poor and I love the poor. I see what they call the poor of this country and how many there are who feel for them!

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

The first world is going to have to account for this sort of horrible poverty in our midst. We have to, first of all, become aware of it. We have to take responsibility for it. And then we have to do something about it for our own freedom, for our own salvation, for our own humanity.

The poor are our brothers and sisters ... people in the world who need love, who need care, who have to be wanted.

I don't think we can be entirely happy seeing such misery around us.

You, I, we all encounter behaviors that we might say, I wouldn't do that. But she has a huge amount of contact with how people live. She sees more hospices and sink estates than most people.

When we see people that are impoverished and people who are dealt an unfair hand, then if we have the power to help them, we should try to do that.

We are truly to be pitied.

A change of mentality is needed, no longer seeing the poor as a burden, or as intruders trying to profit from others, but as people seeking to share the goods of the world so that we can create a just and prosperous world for all.

While women weep, as they do now, I'll fight While little children go hungry, as they do now, I'll fight While men go to prison, in and out, in and out, as they do now, I'll fight While there is a drunkard left, While there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, While there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I'll fight-I'll fight to the very end!

Not to share one’s goods with the poor is to rob them and to deprive them of life. It is not our goods that we possess, but theirs.

Beggars remind us that not all miseries arise from our ideas.

Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.

There are 200 million poor in the world who would gladly take the vow of poverty if they could eat, dress and have a home like I do

To be able to proclaim the Good News to the poor we must know what is poverty.

Throughout our world the cry of the poor so often goes unheard. The prophets harangued Israel and Judah unceasingly about the powerless and marginalized, the overlooked widows, orphans, and "sojourners in our midst," who are still with us today as single mothers, hungry children, and helpless immigrants, wraiths invisible in our prosperous societies.

We need to realize that poverty doesn't only consist of being hungry for bread, but rather it is a tremendous hunger for human dignity. We need to love and to be someone for someone else

We believe that poverty does not belong in a civilized human society. It belongs in museums [...] A poverty-free world might not be perfect, but it would be the best approximation of the ideal.

You cannot walk on the water of hunger, misery, and death. You have to wade through to record them.