socioeconomic hardship Quotes

No money, no family, 16 in the middle of Miami.

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire.

I do not know what horrified me most [during the depression]: the economic misery of my companions [or] their moral and ethical coarseness.

I was born to a black childhood of confusion and poverty. The memory of that beginning influences my work today, It is impossible now to photograph a hungry child without remembering the hunger of my old childhood.

When a man spends his relief checks on green whiskey his children have a way of crying from hunger pains.

Oh, when I was a kid in show business I was poor. I used to go to orgies to eat the grapes.

Born down in a dead man's town, The first kick I took was when I hit the ground, You end up like a dog that's been beat too much, Till you spend half your life just covering up...

Perhaps it is only when people are somewhere near the starvation level that they have anything to sing about.

There will always be places in the world where good schools don't exist and good teachers don't want to go, not just in the developing world but in places of socioeconomic hardship.

We always come back to the same vicious circle - an extreme degree of material or intellectual poverty does away with the means of alleviating it.

Thinking it selfish to dwell on her own sufferings, when in the midst of wretches, who had not only lost all that endears life, but their very selves, her imagination was occupied with melancholy earnestness to trace the mazes of misery, through which so many wretches must have passed to this gloomy receptacle of disjointed souls, to the grand source of human corruption.

We probably looked like starving orphan children. Hey! We were starving orphan children.

One of the big tensions in my life is that I have known the stresses of financial hardship since I was a little kid, and it is the cancer for which I am seeking a cure.

In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge.

It is sad, no doubt, to exhaust one's strength and one's days in cleaving the bosom of this jealous earth, which compels us to wring from it the treasures of its fertility, when a bit of the blackest and coarsest bread is, at the end of the day's work, the sole recompense and the sole profit attaching to so arduous a toil.

You've got a generation of young men - almost all are young men - in situations of great economic hardship, where they don't really have work. The chances of them making a decent life for themselves, of making a family, living in a kind of decent, happy way, are very, very remote. It's very hard for them to ever even have that as a dream, so when people are that deprived of the ordinary hope of human beings, it creates anger. And that anger can be channeled by unscrupulous persons, whether secular or religious leaders, and there's been a lot of that.

In vast stretches of the earth, men awoke today in hunger. They will spend the day in unceasing toil. And as the sun goes down they will still know hunger. They will see suffering in the eyes of their children. Many despair that their labor will ever decently shelter their families or protect them against disease. So long as this is so, peace and freedom will be in danger throughout our world. For wherever free men lose hope of progress, liberty will be weakened and the seeds of conflict will be sown.

The Great Depression was going on, so that the station and the streets teemed with homeless people, just as they do today. The newspapers were full of stories of worker layoffs and farm foreclosures and bank failures, just as they are today. All that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can hide a Great Depression. We may even be hiding a Third World War.

In far Eastern Russia, there's just some towns that time has forgotten. I guess they used to maybe be industrial or something that are now there's just lots of rusty hulks of buildings and a lot of people wandering around, a lot of alcoholism and violence because people have got nothing to do and no work. Yet people were very generous.

I am sure that hon. members will realize that I am not drawing on my imagination when I state that last fall there were children going to school in Saskatchewan with only sacking wrapped around their feet. We have gone into homes and found mothers and children lying on piles of bedding in the corner; they did not have the proper bedding equipment or the proper clothing to meet the rigours of a very cold winter.