Frank McCourt Quotes

Poverty is a veil that obscures the face of greatness. An appeal is a mask covering the face of tribulation.

There is despair, Mr President, in the faces of those you do not see; in the places that you do not visit.

Gentlemen, I speak to you for the miners' families... The little children are gathered around a bare table without anything to eat. They are not asking for a $100,000 yacht like yours, Mr.______..." (here, he would gesture with his cigar toward an operator), "...or for a Rolls-Royce limousine like yours, Mr. _____..." (staring at another operator). They are asking only for a slim crust of bread.

The amount of suffering I've seen is beyond belief. The amount of inequality is beyond belief.

Poverty can teach lessons that privilege cannot.

Understandably, no peace can sustained when people continue to suffer from hunger, lack of jobs, lack of basic public services - and most of all - lack of opportunity or hope.

I had a very comfortable life, but there were people who spent their life in prison, whose families were destroyed.

Where is there beauty when you see deprivation and starvation?

The prosperous can not easily form a right idea of misery.

While we yearn for peace, we live in a world burdened with hunger, pain, anguish, loneliness, sickness, and sorrow.

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

Why should there be such abject poverty?

… the unhappy Peasant cannot survive in his humble shelter; today pigswill is his only nourishment; what was once lavished on swine is now shared between man and beast. The People ask only for bread; they are even willing to pay for it with the sweat of their brows: at least let them eat it without watering it with tears.

It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.

Our sweat and our blood have fallen on this land to make other men rich. The pilgrimage is a witness to the suffering we have seen for generations

A large portion of pauperism and misery is really attributable to bad government and injustice.

People who are underprivileged have more to grieve and have more to overcome.

If we take a hard look at what poverty is, its nature, it's not pretty - it's full of trauma.

I think it's criminal the way poverty is allowed to flourish.

Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.

The outrages of the powerful, the insolence of the rich, scorn of the proud, and malice of the uncharitable, all beating against the broken spirit of the unfortunate.

It’s scandalous when one thinks about the people who live in a world in which they need not be hungry, in which they need not die without medical care, in which they need not be illiterate, they need not feel hopeless and miserable so much of the time, and yet they are.

Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred Bard who had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, Teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man's neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled!

It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

... the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be.