Carolyn Chute Quotes

I learnt a hard fact: that dignity is a luxury in our country.

When you cut facilities, slash jobs, abuse power, discriminate, drive people into deeper poverty & shoot people dead whilst refusing to provide answers or justice, the people will rise up & express their anger & frustration if you refuse to hear their cries. A riot is the language of the unheard.

I travel around the world, experiencing every language, every religion... some places where there's just no reason to smile, because their lives are so difficult.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.

Every hour I spent on manual work, every hour I was humiliated in England or degraded has helped me because that's the same way other people feel in the townships here. People are still walking long distances and are working long hours.

I don't hate nobody. I hate certain conditions that are inflicted upon the people - and they're helpless with it.

When a person is humiliated, when his rights are being violated, and he does not have the proper education, naturally he gravitates toward terrorism.

If we continue to create a world where there is poverty and disrespect, there will continue to be terrorism.

It's such a tragedy that man endures in killing his brother and his own kind, putting him in jail and insane asylums, letting him lay out in the street.

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor.

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

Poverty is a noose that strangles humility and breeds disrespect for God and man.

Gentlemen, I speak to you for the miners' families... The little children are gathered around a bare table without anything to eat. They are not asking for a $100,000 yacht like yours, Mr.______..." (here, he would gesture with his cigar toward an operator), "...or for a Rolls-Royce limousine like yours, Mr. _____..." (staring at another operator). They are asking only for a slim crust of bread.

Our sweat and our blood have fallen on this land to make other men rich. The pilgrimage is a witness to the suffering we have seen for generations

There is despair, Mr President, in the faces of those you do not see; in the places that you do not visit.

Terrorism thrives when the gap between the 'haves' and 'have nots' becomes so wide and when the 'have nots' reach the point of such desperation, pain, and agony that they have nothing to lose.

I think it's criminal the way poverty is allowed to flourish.

I've been put down, pushed aside, knocked out.

The amount of suffering I've seen is beyond belief. The amount of inequality is beyond belief.

If I had not been discriminated against or had not suffered persecution, I would never have received the Nobel Prize.

To think, I have had more than 60 years of hard struggle for a little liberty, and then to die without it seems so cruel.

I know what it means to go to the stream to fetch water... what it means when people are poor and don't have enough to eat. It's not enough to say you know about poverty. You have to live it.

There's a difference between someone who's 'harsh' and someone who is 'hard.' Life was hard. You lived in the South, as my grandparents did, and you had to survive. That is hard.