Edward Hirsch Quotes

My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised.

I mean that at least 80% of the Russian people feel destitute. It's the people who had their past and future taken from them - they don't get paid - many of them face a wall. They have nowhere to go.

Bottom 10 Percent progressives are not enthusiastic about concentrations of wealth. But that's not what keeps them up at night. Their focus is on deprivation and lack of opportunity. They're motivated by empathy for people who are suffering, rather than outrage over unjustified wealth.

I come from a world where the word 'trauma' doesn't exist, because we are too poor. I didn't have an easy life compared to the average European. But compared to the average African, it wasn't all that bad.

To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.

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

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg.

The great unwashed

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

There was no pity take of the poor people, who wrought never no manner of treason, yet they bought it dearer than the great personages, such as had done the evil and trespass

The working classes may be injuriously degraded and oppressed in three ways: 1st — When they are neglected in infancy. 2nd — When they are overworked by their employer, and are thus rendered incompetent from ignorance to make a good use of high wages when they can procure them. 3rd — When they are paid low wages for their labor

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it. So long as they tramp the streets, whose stones they lay, whose filth they clean, whose sewers they dig, yet upon which they must not stand too long lest the policeman bid them "move on"; as long as they go from factory to factory, begging for the opportunity to be a slave, receiving the insults of bosses and foremen, getting the old "no," the old shake of the head, in these factories they built, whose machines they wrought; so long as they consent to herd like cattle, in the cities, driven year after year, more and more, off the mortgaged land, the land they cleared, fertilized, cultivated, rendered of value; so long as they stand shivering, gazing thro' plate glass windows at overcoats, which they made, but cannot buy, starving in the midst of food they produced but cannot have; so long as they continue to do these things vaguely relying upon some power outside themselves, be it god, or priest, or politician, or employer, or charitable society, to remedy matters, so long deliverance will be delayed.

Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People

I've always felt unclaimed.

The poor man looks upon the law as an enemy, not as a friend. For him, the law is always taking something away.

There are millions out there who aren't getting an even break. They're being done down.

I didn't have parents I could take a million dollars from. We were a lower-class family.

Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the same animus against the capitalist system as do the wordsmith intellectuals. Only the sense of unrecognized superiority, of entitlement betrayed, produces that animus.

I do not like the way oppressed Filipinos are being treated now. They are oppressed and have no one to turn to.

I had nothing and lived in the most insignificant place.

We were kinda rebels. From the wrong side of the tracks. Down where we were raised, it was a tough town.

To constrain the brute force of the people, the European governments deem it necessary to keep them down by hard labor, poverty and ignorance, and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings, as that unremitting labor shall be necessary to obtain a sufficient surplus to sustain a scanty and miserable life.