Edwin Markham Quotes

There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in sickly air. People can be slaveships in shoes.

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

A scene of misery and gloomy despair of a community of people who have been plunged abruptly from prosperity to a complete want of the most essential things of life.

It is the destiny of the people of Haiti to suffer.

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

Where is there beauty when you see deprivation and starvation?

We hate our squalor.

There was a time when I had nothing. I lost everything.

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!

The slave labors, but with no cheer - it is not the road to respectability, it will honor him with no citizens' trust, it brings no bread to his family, no grain to his garner, no leisure in after-days, no books or papers to his children. It opens no school-house door, builds no church, rears for him no factory, lays no keel, fills no bank, earns no acres. With sweat and toil and ignorance he consumes his life, to pour the earnings into channels from which he does no drink, into hands that never honor him. But perpetually rob and often torment.

Everything that poverty touches becomes frightful.

Poverty, for me, is synonymous with degradation.

Loneliness and hunger were my fortunes of creation.

Want is misery.

I hate to see anybody sink. I hate to see anybody lose their dream, lose their home, something like that.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

His eyes so dim, so wasted each limb, that, heedless of grammar, they all cried, that's him!

Poverty makes you sad as well as wise.

We were poor, my mother and I, living in a world of doom and gloom, pessimism and bitterness, where storms raged and wolves scratched at the door.

Life is painful, nasty and short... in my case it has only been painful and nasty.

Poverty makes you wise but it's a curse.

When we struggle, as so many do, in grinding poverty, or when our enemies prevail against us, or when sickness is not healed, the enemy of our souls can send his evil message that there is no God or that if He exists He does not care about us.

In 1843, everybody was hungry, unemployed, and conditions were very bad.

I am talking about misery and all of its implications.

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