Abhijit Banerjee Quotes

Things were so bad we ate rabbits that neighbours had run over and gave to us because they knew we were broke.

I had spent many days hungry; had slept on railway stations at times because I did not have money to pay for a hotel room... there were moments when I felt I had compromised my dignity as a human being and as an actor.

Big Beggarman

There's something very visceral about watching people beg for money. It's powerful.

I used to sit in front of McDonald's and ask people for dollars to get me a cheeseburger. It was bad.

My mother, we were a very poor family. When I was a kid, we would be in our little room, and there would be a knock on the door almost every night with a hobo begging for food. Even though we didn't even have enough to eat, my mother always found something to give them.

We couldn't afford anything. Suitcase, clothes, everything, Barellan people bought for me.

I've written just about everything for the sake of putting shoes on the children's feet - and a bottle of gin in the cupboard.

What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?

People who are homeless, they're not all addicts. A lot of times, they're just people who, through something like losing their job or losing someone in their life, ended up on the streets. So much of our time is spent in cars that sometimes you need to look out of those windows. And you see that a dollar, 50 cents, whatever you have, may not mean much to you, but it means everything to people who are hungry and who are in need.

Give, but, if possible, spare the poor man the shame of begging.

The world does not have time to be with the poor, to learn with the poor, to listen to the poor. To listen to the poor is an exercise of great discipline, but such listening surely is what is required if charity is not to become a hatred of the poor for being poor.

For all of my fortune, there are many with misfortune that need a hand.

I grew up poor, but I didn't really know it because of amazing places like the Salvation Army where we got a lot of our Christmas presents from.

How can a man help breaking the law when he don't have money to live on?

Hope is a flatterer, but the most upright of all parasites; for she frequents the poor man's hut, as well as the palace of his superior.

When I go to Africa and spend more time there with people who are the least of the least, those in desperate situations, I am broken by it. But I also find people with so much more joy and freedom living with nothing than I see walking down the streets of my own community here in Tennessee.

To be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him who begs his daily bread.

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

To see those babies with no food for three of four days, old people sitting in the hot sun, when you see these poor people, you cannot help but being compassionate or affected.

Having leveled my palace, don't erect a hovel and complacently admire your own charity in giving me that for a home.

There is no dignity without work. You can't tell someone who has nothing to eat to stay patient.

I hate the idea of people nicking my stuff, but in all honesty, I'm pretty well off. If a genuinely desperate man on his last gasp nicks my coat from the pub on a freezing night, well, he's welcome to it. It'll change his life. Mine's only inconvenienced by having to buy another one.

Yeah, I'll basically do anything to make money for food.

Even a poor man doesn't ask alms unless he sees you have the ability to give.