Jacqueline Novogratz Quotes

In Africa, we were around thousands of people who have seen a lot of poverty, but they were fun at the end of the day.

I was in the heart and soul of Baltimore. I definitely felt a connection to the people. They're really hard-working people that want to have a better life. And I saw the struggle that exists there.

The depth of darkness to which you can descend and still live is an exact measure of the height to which you can aspire to reach.

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, so there was always a sense of struggle, but we had hope.

My favorite stories are about kids who refuse to give up; their homes and schools may have been destroyed; they've probably had to rely on themselves more than a lot of adults do, and they've resisted the many bad alternatives that city life offers to poor teens.

I learnt in South America and in Africa that people who have really big problems in the ghetto always keep a sense of humour and remain positive. If not, you go down.

I came from the projects. So there were times I'd wake up at night, and my palms would be itching to get out. But no matter where I was, I always looked at the stars, because there's nothing ugly about the sky. That was my escape.

I grew up poor, but I didn't have poor dreams

If you walked by a street and you was walking a concrete and you saw a rose growing from concrete, even if it had messed up petals and it was a little to the side you would marvel at just seeing a rose grow through concrete. So way is it that when you see some ghetto kid grow out of the dirtiest circumstance and he can talk and he can sit across the room and make you cry, make you laugh, all you can talk about is my dirty rose, my dirty stems and how am leaning crooked to the side, u can't even see that I've come up from out of that.

Growing up in Kenya, slum life was not far away. I had family that lived in slums, so I visited them often, and so I've seen and interacted with abject poverty. But I also know that because of that, poverty is not the definition of the people that live there.

We sit in the mud... and reach for the stars.

I can be poor, I can lose a job, I can have a hospital bill that I don't know how to pay, for I can do all these things through Him who strengthens me.

Life must continue, even with the security situation so bad, because I have ambitions. I love this sport too much.

When I am made fun of in the press I just remember those days when I'd come home to find that the water had been turned off because my mother couldn't afford the bill. Suddenly, everything feels easier.

We were very poor and my family lost everything during the war - our home and our identity. But I'm a believer in luck and think the social conditions you're born into provide the opportunity for you to prove your luck. And I suppose I've been lucky.

In Detroit, in a city that in many cases the world has rejected, that's where God shows up. Every example in the Gospels where God shows up, it's always when the seas are the stormiest, where there is discontinuity.

Normally street children are shown in terms of the tragedy of their lives - which is true - but there's also another dimension: their wisdom, dignity and enormous capacity for survival.

All I'm trying to do is survive and make good out of the dirty, nasty, unbelievable lifestyle that they gave me.

No, I was two years older than the other guys. I was a war baby. My family were a lot poorer than they were. I'd had to fight too hard for anything I had in my life and to smash things up for me.

A lot of children grow up in poverty with flawed parents, but their inner world is still as inherently filled with wonder and innocence as children who are kept away from the city's underbelly.

When a lot of things are going the wrong way for a country, for a people, when you can't really think of anything worse than a war, you always try to take life on the brighter side and that's how I grew up with my parents.

I believe very deeply in the human spirit, and I have a sense of awe about it. I look around and ask, 'What makes the difference? What is it?' I've known people the world has thrown everything at - to discourage them, to kill them, to break their spirit. And yet something about them retains a dignity. They face life and they don't ask quarters.

The slums are not a place of despair. Its inhabitants are all working towards a better life.

I wanted to be a doctor at one point and I also wanted to be a pilot. I think if you grow up in a dodgy area, reality often beats down those ambitions as you get older. But with me that never really happened.

I was born in a slum, but the slum wasn't born in me.