Lao Tzu Quotes

The money I pay for my cultural experiences came willingly from my own pocket - they were not the result of bread being removed from the mouths of the poor so that Miss Thing here could mince off to the circus smelling of roses.

The wealthiest Sudanese don't know what war is. Their children are safe in school.

Jamaica's a country of great dichotomy. On the one hand you have a tourist industry with great beaches and resorts, but on the other you have such great poverty and the violence that goes along with that.

... an apathetic indifferent meat in a sandwich that has an ever thinning slice of maniacal Plutocratic Gluttony on top and an ever thickening slice of rotten vermin rottening at the bottom.

When I was young, we had nothing. The carpets and upholstery in the palace were full of holes. The floors creaked. Everything was so old. Yes, we had a piano, an upright given to us by the Fine Arts Department. But it was out of tune.

When you socially neglect a people, when you economically abandon a people, when you transfer wealth from them to the well-to-do, what are a people going to do? They're going to respond with very sad forms of despair, and that's true for everybody - I don't care what color you are.

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

Worthless as wither'd weeds.

Why do some people have to go barefoot so that others can drive luxury cars? Why are some people able to live only 35 years in order that others can live 70 years? Why do some people have to be miserably poor in order that others can be extravagantly rich? I speak for all the children in the world who don't even have a piece of bread.

People starve. The rulers consume too much with their taxes. That is why people starve.

To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.

To be among people who are smothered in furs when one hasn't any oneself makes one want to break most of the Commandments.

And below the heimongmong, all along the ground, were weeds already spilling out over the edges, running wild in every direction.

Why, when people are starving, am I on a carpet that's red? Because I'm "important"? Because I'm "famous"? That's not how I roll.

There is something patently insane about all the typewriters sleeping with all the beautiful plumbing in the beautiful office buildings -and all the people sleeping in the slums.

I discovered suddenly that alienation, exploitation of man by man, under-nourishment, relegated to the background metaphysical evil which is a luxury.

Poverty, labor, and calamity are not without their luxuries, which the rich, the indolent, and the fortunate in vain seek for.

If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.

Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere "opiate of the people" have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all mankind except the poor.

London is like the tropical bush -- if you don't exercise constant care the jungle, in the shape of the slums, will break in.

Wherever there is excessive wealth, there is also in the train of it excessive poverty.

The people starve because those above them eat too much tax-grain. That is the only reason why they starve.

He who has nothing—it has been said many times—has nothing to lose but his chains.

Rich people (in Australia) have swimming pools in their gardens but, at least, they do swim in them.