Street Children Quotes

I never thought it was fair for an 8-year-old child not to be able to afford shoes, or to wander the streets having to beg for money. To know that child's joy would end soon, when they realised there was no future.

An evil and a reproach to our municipality, for which the laws and ordinances afford no adequate remedy. I allude to the constantly increasing number of vagrants, idle and vicious children of both sexes, who infest our public thoroughfares, hotels, docks, &c.; children who are growing up in ignorance and profligacy, only destined to a life of misery, shame and crime, and ultimately to a felon's doom. Their numbers are almost incredible, and to those whose business and habits do not permit them a searching scrutiny, the degrading and disgusting practices of these almost infants, in the school of vice, prostitution and rowdyism, would certainly be beyond belief… they never see the inside of a schoolroom; and so far as our excellent system of public education is concerned, and which may be truly said to be the foundation stone of our free institutions, is to them an entire nullity. Left in many instances to roam day and night wherever their inclination leads them, a large proportion of these juvenile vagrants are in the daily practice of pilfering wherever opportunity offers, and begging when they cannot steal.

We cannot rest while Brazilians are going hungry, while families are living in the streets, while poor children are abandoned to their own fates and while crack and crack dens rule.

The jails are full of kids from kids' homes. You're 16 years old, and you're out on the street. How you going to fend for yourself at 16 if you've not had an education? You're going to turn to crime.

I have a foundation where it caters to street children and entices them to go back to school. The street is not a good school for them. They need to go to a proper school.

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.

It was a very scary place to be. I don't think any mother or father would like to have their five year old wandering alone in the slums and train stations of Calcutta.

Kids have to be tough to survive on the streets of Kathmandu, where older gang members often beat and rob them. They face cold winters, hunger, homelessness, and unsympathetic police. But under each hardened shell there is still a child.

There are children who are working in textile businesses in Asia who would be prostitutes on the streets if they did not have those jobs.

Palestinians no longer blamed Yasser Arafat or Hamas for their troubles. Now they blamed the Israelis for killing their children. But I still couldn't escape a fundamental question: Why were those children out there in the first place? Where were the parents? Why didn't their mothers and fathers keep them inside? Those children should have been sitting at their desks in school, not running in the streets throwing stones at armed soldiers.

I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago 's South Side.

We can't forget that there are so many young people who are homeless - and unbelievably vulnerable.

Most homeless kids are on the streets because they have been forced by circumstances that cause them to think that they are safer there than in any home they once knew.

I am a psycho therapist and I used to teach street children.

As long as I can keep one child off the streets or change one child's life for the better, then that's enough for me.

I just feel such a connection to the little kids in Naples. I remember being on the street wanting a small piece of candy.

And if I could get the mayors, and the governors, and the president to look into the eyes of the five-year-olds of this nation, dressed in old raggedy clothes, whose zippers are broken but whose dreams are still alive, they would know what I know-that children need people to fight for them. To stand with them on the most dangerous streets, in the dirtiest hallways, in their darkest hours.

You can't become a billionaire stepping over children sleeping on the street.

I never meet a ragged boy in the street without feeling that i may owe him a salute, for I know not what possibilities may be buttoned up under his coat.

The streets of India are not safe for children, and every year, thousands are forced to live on the streets, avoiding being kidnapped or worse.

In other countries, it's a common thing to have outcast children running around the streets in packs, and I don't think we're so far away from it here.

My dream is to get the young people off the streets, to make it possible for them to play football in the stadium instead.

Be present to those who, living in the midst of a society burdened by poverty and corruption, are broken in spirit, tempted to give up, to leave school and to live on the streets.

We spent most of our life almost like street rats just running around the street until we were ten years old.

I mean I've seen so many kids on the street when we're like in the bus, they're screaming 'go Nigeria, go Nigeria,' so to represent them I'm just proud.