Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

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

Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.

The hardest work in the world is being out of work.

I avoid going through places where there's too much poverty.

Where the despair of loneliness and poverty haunts every hour, the optimism to embark on new projects cannot find a place to alight on the brain's cortex. Poverty itself is an enormous obstacle to an enlightened and enlightening - not to say healthy - old age.

I mean that at least 80% of the Russian people feel destitute. It's the people who had their past and future taken from them - they don't get paid - many of them face a wall. They have nowhere to go.

My parents were children during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it scarred them. Especially my father, who saw destitution in his Brooklyn, New York neighborhood; adults standing in so called 'bread lines,' children begging in the streets.

The Depression did more to me than being a little Lebanese kid did.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

In my family and in my community, I see people struggling with drug addiction, with poverty and the effects of generational poverty; I see people struggling with lack of access to healthcare.

I have been down and out, living in Brooklyn, no money even for a subway, no food whatsoever. Like, I remember just sitting in my room all day - even my television wasn't working!

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.

It was a very difficult time after the fall of the Soviet Union. Jobs were difficult, and you had to fight to have anything nice.

There are people in America who are absolutely desperate right now, who have no means to support their families, who have no opportunities to better themselves or their education - and they're not that different from the farmers and working-class people that I visited when I went to Kenya with Oxfam.

To suppose such a thing possible as a society, in which men, who are able and willing to work, cannot support their families, and ought, with a great part of the women, to be compelled to lead a life of celibacy, for fear of having children to be starved; to suppose such a thing possible is monstrous.

Men and women of high professional standing were reduced to the status of vagrants, unable to find employment and forced to eat the bitter bread of public or private charity.

Poverty snatches the reins out of the hand of piety.

My parents tried so hard to do what they could to keep us in school, but school didn't last but four months out of the year and most of the time we didn't have clothes to wear.

African-Americans now 45 percent poverty in the inner cities. The education is a disaster. Jobs are essentially nonexistent.

Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.

Poverty consist in feeling poor.

The people who pay the biggest price are those who are struggling.

Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality, to the world and to life.

I am saying the same to Muslims in the global South, telling them: "Just ignore what is done." However, in the Southern countries they are not living in a comfortable society like you and me. They deal with unemployment, corruption, and surviving. For the majority of them, their religion is helping them survive.

Last time I talked to her she didn't sound like herself. She's depressed. It's awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they're no good.