Samuel Beckett Quotes

We hate our squalor.

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

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.

Aspiring beggary is wretchedness itself.

If you were the poor, suffering was your currency.

Loneliness and hunger were my fortunes of creation.

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.

In Hanover Park they highlighted the terrible plight of backyard dwellers and the fact that year after year nothing has been done to help you: the hope and despair you all live with every day.

It is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.

As London is the greatest of all cities, there is naturally the greatest amount of human wretchedness to be seen concentrated within it; wretchedness too, that is made to look still more wretched, simply from the fact of its being associated with the most abundant comfort in the world.

From these cities they would go on again, by the roads of vines and olives, through squalid villages, where there was not a hovel without a gap in its filthy walls, not a window with a whole inch of glass or paper; where there seemed to be nothing to support life, nothing to eat, nothing to make, nothing to grow, nothing to hope, nothing to do but die.

Poverty is the root of all evil.

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.

I don't just live in a bubble in Los Angeles. I'm on the road all the time. I say hello to people everywhere. That way, you get to see what despair is around the holidays. People are making terrible choices: Do I have heat in the winter or food on the table? Decisions between filling the gas tank or buying a gift for a kid.

I know what it is to have nothing.

And one thing to be remembered: it is not that the people who are poor, starving, become frustrated with life - no. They cannot become frustrated. They have not lived yet - how can they be frustrated? They have hopes. A poor man always has hopes that something is going to happen - if not today then tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow; if not in this life then in the next life.

We have two useless gods who never leave our island, but like to dwell in it constantly, Poverty and Helplessness.

My Brother starv'd between two Walls,His Children's Cry my Soul appalls

At a certain depth of distress, the poor, in their stupor, groan no longer over evil, and are no longer thankful for good.

Give me hunger, pain and want, Shut me out with shame and failure From your doors of gold and fame, Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger! But leave me a little love.

Feel like a broke-down engine, ain't got no drivin' wheel. You all been down and lonesome, you know just how a poor man feels.

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

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering

Poverty, for me, is synonymous with degradation.