Shaun Livingston Quotes

A man with money to pay for a meal can talk about hunger without demeaning himself. ... But for a man with no money hunger is a disgrace.

We lived in a neighborhood that was too rich for us. When I was young, I had to deliver groceries to the homes of the kids I went to school with. I had to go to the back doors to make the deliveries. It was embarrassing. That was one thing out of a hundred.

I was always the poor kid, even though I very much tried to pretend to be the other way. Always well presented. Always really active in the school, doing fashion shows, plays, involved in every single aspect of the school. Overcompensating, I think, for the fact that I knew I wouldn't be going on the ski trip every January.

Growing up poor, I didn't even have a lunch to take to school. Lunch was 26 cents, and we didn't even know what 26 cents looked like. I didn't love school because I wanted to disguise that I was poorer than everybody else.

There is nothing worse than being ashamed of parsimony or poverty.

I couldn't feel good about myself hanging out in Armani clothes when my girlfriend can't even pay her heating bill. I'd feel foul and I'd be embarrassed.

If everybody lives in the same way, there's something almost narcotizing about it, but the true misery of economic class difference is knowing that you can't have what somebody else does.

None of my friends were ever as broke as I was.

There's no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty.

I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.

All of us kids in the neighbourhood had to go shoeless for the same reason - all except the landlord's son, because his father had more income.

I didn't have a choice growing up but to be more insecure because others had more.

Before playing football, I didn't fit in anywhere. My parents didn't have a lot of money, which they spent on our education to send us to Catholic private school in Oakland, mostly black. The other kids had more money than I did. I started school early; I was young. So I'd come back to my hood and read.

Well, I mean, you have an emotion, you want to express it. You don't just look in the camera and do it. You want to hide from the embarrassment of your brother saying you're not allowed to come into my town.

Where I came from, people couldn't afford to go to the theatre.

Back then, we didn't know we were poor, and people were more proud then.

You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.

Bums are the well-to-do of this day. They didn't have as far to fall.

Money embarrasses me.

The gap between the rich and poor is widening fast.

The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none.

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.

It seems to me that most people are interested in reading about characters who are richer than they are.

A poor man is a man who has not got much money. This may seem a simple and unnecessary description, but in the face of a great mass of modern fact and fiction, it seems very necessary indeed; most of our realists and sociologists talk about a poor man as if he were an octopus or an alligator.

I'm tired of people on trust funds telling people on food stamps how to live.