Poor Conditions Quotes

When I started, I had nothing. Because my family was really, really, really poor.

At the age of five years to enter a spinning-cotton or other factory, and from that time forth to sit there daily, first ten, then twelve, and ultimately fourteen hours, performing the same mechanical labor, is to purchase dearly the satisfaction of drawing breath. But this is the fate of millions, and that of millions more is analogous to it.

It is as bad as bad can be: it is ill-fed, ill-killed, ill-kept, and ill-drest.

That was where my dream began to take hold, of not havin' to pick cotton and potatoes, and not havin' to be uncomfortable, too hot or too cold. That in itself had driven me to try to find some better way of life.

I don’t like the work but mother is dead and father brought me down [to the mines.] I had no choice. I have a harness on like a horse and pull carts. Large carts hold seven and a half hundredweight. [750 lbs.]

A king of a large and fruitful territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day labourer in England.

Every opponent to socialism should consciously investigate if he, when he lived in hopeless poverty and humiliation, also would be an opponent to socialism

After joining as a youth trainee at 16 from school, in my first two or three years the club was on a financial downward spiral and there was none of the new sparkling kit and the sparkling conditions that the kids get now.

Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet's dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.

Times were poor. I wore hand-me-downs. And because the kids just older than me in the family were girls, sometimes I had to wear my sisters' hand-me-downs.

Hatred, intolerance, poor hygienic conditions and violence all have roots in illiteracy, so we're trying to do something to help the poor and the needy.

Vast areas are witness to the struggles of destitute populations trying to survive under unlivable conditions.

My first day in grade school, I was plain scared. I left the comfort of my run-down house, which I loved, and went to school where it was cold, it smelled, the lighting was bad.

The miserable living conditions, the long [work] hours, the universal insecurity, tended to tear down the personality, cheapen the man.

Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of [Muslim] rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound.

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.

The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations.

The cow of many, well milked and badly fed.

I was raised on the Hudson, in a house that had been the stable of the financier and Civil War general Brayton Ives. In midcentury, we had fire pits in the floor for heating, and rats everywhere, because they nested in the hay insulation.

But what makes wage slaves? Wages!

Poverty demoralizes.

I have always had a horror and detestation of poverty.

The first job I ever had was at a pool-liner-manufacturing plant. Minimum wage was $4.25, and that's what I was making. It was this huge, hot, un-air-conditioned factory staffed with all women and me. This is in Georgia, during the summertime, so it was pretty ridiculous.

Fine!" muttered Mogget. "Wet, cold, and full of holes. Another fun day on the river.

I was sleeping on editing room floors for $300 a week.