Precarious Living Conditions Quotes

Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.

When we foster an economy without hope, we guarantee that a segment of our population will be destined to know homelessness on a permanent basis, and not for the one night I voluntarily spent at a shelter.

Poor people do not cause poverty. Poverty is thrust upon them.

My father and his eight siblings grew up in the kind of poverty that Americans don't like to talk about unless a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina strikes, and then the conversation only lasts as long as the news cycle. His family squatted in shacks. The children scavenged for food.

Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn't have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America's poor deserve better than this.

Who is affected more when it's cold? Poor people. Who is affected more when it's hot? Poor people. Who is affected more when it's wet? Poor people. Who is most affected when the economy is bad? Poor people. Poor people are the most fragile.

The Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only. To the wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage.

I do have a problem with developments that hyper-exploit politically vulnerable communities for profit. That it continues is a shame upon us all, because we are all responsible for the future that we create.

To be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born "illegals."

I've known what it's like to survive without a steady job. Growing up in the Philippines, I watched my parents juggle part-time jobs at the corner shop and as tailors, barely able to make ends meet for my three brothers and me.

As a black person in America, I am twice as likely as a white person to live in an area where air pollution poses the greatest risk to my health. I am five times more likely to live within walking distance of a power plant or chemical facility - which I do.

The texture and hardship of poverty and eviction is something that I think left the deepest impression on me, and I hope that I try to convey a little bit of that to the reader.

There is plenty of housing - for the rich. But a series of outrageous policies ensure that it remains inaccessible to the poor.

The rich, by unfair combinations, contribute frequently to prolong a season of distress among the poor.

My sister women, those struggling with social problems, and those who slave all their lives long for a community – shop, factory and domestic slaves, earning barely a subsistence, and thrown aside to death or the parish when they are no longer profitable – mothers, bearing and rearing children, seeing them go forth… and spending their own last years, lonely and unconsidered in the cheerless wards of the workhouse.

There is already a generation of European graduates who feel they have been robbed of the better future they were led to expect. They are members of a new class: the precariat.

You don't want to end up telling somebody who's homeless or a refugee that stress is all perceptual, because it sure isn't in those cases. But most of us have fairly neurotic middle-class stressors.

We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of 'choice' and a denial of reality - a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, and a growing machinery of social and civil death.