Penelope Spheeris Quotes

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'd met a woman and I got married, but the money ran out right away. I hadn't had a job for seven months, and it just came over me that I was never going to work again. It hit me.

The poor prey on one another because their lives offer no hope and communicate the tragic message to these human beings that they have no possibility to attain a decent standard of living.

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.

Poverty must have many satisfactions, else there would not be so many poor people.

Russia is in the advanced stages of poverty.

Poverty is about people lacking the tools they need to get on in life. And solving it is about tackling educational failure, antisocial behaviour, debt problems and addiction, and of course it's about work.

I have lived poverty. I didn't choose it. No one would choose humiliation, pain, and rage.

Detroit can't come close to repairing the decades of neglect without addressing the crisis in our neighborhoods. I live in southwest Detroit near Woodmere Cemetery. My neighbors and I deal with the negative impacts of job loss, increased poverty, and pollution every day.

It is simply not credible to tackle child poverty without acknowledging the worst issue - a lack of money.

It is very easy for middle-class people who come from moneyed backgrounds not to understand what it's like for people when they first go down to the dole office because they've lost their jobs.

The hollowing out of the middle class is a problem common to all Western industrialized economies. Maybe we should work together to solve it.

If you've just been sacked from work, with no money coming in and a baby to feed, clothe and keep warm, it's unlikely you'll have a thousand pounds or so to spare.

In America people get depressed for no reason. They say, 'I'm sad my boyfriend didn't call me.' I tell them, 'How would you like to spend 12 hours on a line to get bread or a chicken?' That is depressing.

Of course homelessness has many causes and the solutions are often frustratingly complex.

Lagos is sometimes emblematic of disorder. In traffic, drivers make their own rules. There is a constant war between our street hawkers and our various forms of law enforcement deployed to eradicate the 'indiscipline' of poverty.

In Cameroon, kids have many problems. They think everything is lost before they are born. It seems like they are not allowed to dream. They are not allowed to be ambitious. They just accept being the victim of their life.

When I was in senior year of high school, my mom lost her job, we lost our house, and we had to move in with my uncle and my aunt.

The absence of state capacity - that is, of the services and protections that people in rich countries take for granted - is one of the major causes of poverty and deprivation around the world.

I knew when I left school, my stomach would probably hurt from having nothing to eat, and I would be going back to those same circumstances that were breaking me.

You cannot understand what it means to be poor until you have suffered it.

The middle-class ladder has rungs that no longer exist for many trying to climb higher. Instead, for too many, in too many places, their chore is simply trying to hang on.

Especially in a rich nation, there is absolutely no reason why everyone couldn't and shouldn't have a life of dignity.

We are a country that has always been known for providing opportunities to people. We have lost a lot of that opportunity.

The 'Guardian' supports the vital work that volunteers and campaigners do to mitigate homelessness and destitution; we will also continue to report on the causes of homelessness and destitution and urge policy change that will solve it.