Abdullah II of Jordan Quotes

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.

Marriage is the death of hope.

Some feel as though the world is their oyster; others feel as though they were the oyster itself, plucked from the ocean, cracked open, and robbed of all that is precious to them.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick.

One bright sunny morning In the shadow of the steeple By the Relief Office I saw my people-- As they stood hungry I stood there wondering If God blessed America for me.

People would rather live in an area of poverty than in an area where there are no jobs, because if they live in poverty, they have a certain sense of hope they can get out of it. If there are no jobs, there's no hope. And bad things come from that.

And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.

Chance has never yet satisfied the hope of a suffering people.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

My dad had a lot of bad luck. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one.

It's maddening in my travels to watch children dying simply because they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

By the time I was 30, nobody would work with me. I was friendless, I was hopeless, I was suicidal, lost my family - I mean, it was bad. Bottomed out, didn't know what I was going to do. I actually thought I was going to be a chef - go to work in a kitchen someplace.

I don't want to dream anymore, I want my life to be real!

The problem isn't that people don't understand how good things are. It's that they know, from personal experience, that things really aren't that good.

If beggars do not hate the rest of us, they are even more abject than I had imagined.

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.

It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

You don't seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help.

Poverty makes you sad as well as wise.

Sometimes, I can myself be frustrated by books that seem to me to be insufficiently realistic about the world's potential for just being totally a randomly bad place.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

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.

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

When I go to Afghanistan, I realize I've been spared, due to a random genetic lottery, by being born to people who had the means to get out. Every time I go to Afghanistan I am haunted by that.