Mary Heaton Vorse Quotes

Remember 1932. You remember the closed banks and the breadlines and the starvation wages; the foreclosures of homes and farms, and the bankruptcies of business; the Hoovervilles: and the young men and women of the Nation facing a hopeless, jobless, future: the closed factories and mines and mills: the ruined and abandoned farms: the stalled railroads and the empty clocks; the blank despair of a whole Nation—and the utter impotence of the Federal Government.

There is a dream on the street. I hear it constantly - finding a piece of land, raising food, building a house. I hear talk of hopelessness. The price of land, you know. Housing is impossible. They are trapped in a cycle. How can you ask for a job after you've been sleeping in the bushes all night?

If beggars do not hate the rest of us, they are even more abject than I had imagined.

An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.

All the principal towns are sadly decayed, and instead of finding every mortal employed, you meet with multitudes of poor creatures who are starving in idleness.

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!

Not having a roof over your head at night must be frightening, cold, lonely and depressing. To be seriously ill as well must be beyond upsetting.

Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soulless army of human prey.

I grew up in the east side of Detroit in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. I never woke up saying, 'I'm an orphan again today, isn't this terrible? Poor me.'

My background is degradation and sloth, mostly.

I'd like to do things to make money to save myself but right now I can't do nothing. If they want to put me in jail, they can do that. It's kind of tough.

When we foster an economy without hope, we guarantee that a segment of our population will be destined to know homelessness on a permanent basis, and not for the one night I voluntarily spent at a shelter.

I never thought it was fair for an 8-year-old child not to be able to afford shoes, or to wander the streets having to beg for money. To know that child's joy would end soon, when they realised there was no future.

What is so striking about Liberia is that in a place where there is so much to be done, I have never seen so many people with nothing to do.

Prolonged unemployment is a tragedy of broken lives, broken families, foreclosed homes, and life without health insurance.

No city in Italy contains so many miserable beggars, and no town in the world so many blind.

But where else should they sleep?

Bread for the Needy, clothing for the naked, and houses for the homeless.

There are thousands on thousands in New York who have no assignable home.

There are no "points of light" for those who sleep on grates and park benches.

The depression in the business world is reaching its height. Unemployment is increasing daily. The family is breaking up. Starving people fill the streets…. This is the responsibility of statesmen who govern under the auspices of the Emperor’s will. To ignore this situation is to ignore the Emperor’s will.

Men who were heads of families wandering the streets, eating from garbage cans

One bright sunny morning In the shadow of the steeple By the Relief Office I saw my people-- As they stood hungry I stood there wondering If God blessed America for me.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

… there were days … when I came back from some scene of eviction so maddened by the sights of hunger and misery I had seen in the day’s work that I felt disposed to take the gun from behind my door and shoot the first landlord I met.