#overt

While a handful of countries and a small number of people are leading ample life, dozens of countries and billions of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America are being left in absolute poverty. ↗

— Tran Duc Luong

#africa #america #ample #asia #being

I am thankful when I am hungry because then I know that when I eat, the food will taste better. Life has taught me that my true contentment rests in hope, and the pleasure itself is secondary. It is self-awareness, not happiness, that maintains peace. ↗

— Criss Jami

#content #contentment #eating #enjoyment #faith

A doctrine of class war seemed to provide a solution to the problem of poverty to people who know nothing about how wealth is created. ↗

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

#class #created #doctrine #how #know

Because Katrina put it out there, no one can play the pretend game anymore that there isn't poverty and inequality in this country. The Millions More Movement - Katrina gives it added significance. ↗

— Marc Morial

#anymore #because #country #game #gives

Listen to me. I’m shy. I’m not stupid. I can’t meet people’s eyes. I don’t know if you understand what that’s like. There’s a whole world going on around me, I’m aware of that. It’s not because I don’t want to look at you, Lucinda. It’s that I don’t want to be seen. ↗

— Jonathan Lethem

#shy #love

If we are not being maligned, scandalizing those who still sleep in the church, then we are missing the incarnational call to love the world's most vulnerable, the world's exiled, the world's most wounded. Our concern should be what the poor and prostituted think of us, what the God of the universe thinks of us, not what those around us think of us. ↗

— Sarah Lance

#caring #church #compassion #excile #god

Introverts living under the Extroversion Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform ↗

— Susan Cain

#psychology #oppression

To get rich, one must have but a single idea, one fixed, hard, immutable thought: the desire to make a heap of gold. And in order to increase this heap of gold, one must be inflexible, a usurer, thief, extortionist, and murderer! And one must especially mistreat the small and the weak! And when this mountain of gold has been amassed, one can climb up on it, and from up on the summit, a smile on one’s lips, one can contemplate the valley of poor wretches that one has created. ↗

— Petrus Borel

#poverty #rich #wealth #capitalism

And St. Francis added: "My dear and beloved Brother, the treasure of blessed poverty is so very precious and divine that we are not worthy to possess it in our vile bodies. For poverty is that heavenly virtue by which all earthy and transitory things are trodden under foot, and by which every obstacle is removed from the soul so that it may freely enter into union with the eternal Lord God. It is also the virtue which makes the soul, while still here on earth, converse with the angels in Heaven. It is she who accompanied Christ on the Cross, was buried with Christ in the Tomb, and with Christ was raised and ascended into Heaven, for even in this life she gives to souls who love her the ability to fly to Heaven, and she alone guards the armor of true humility and charity. ↗

— St. Francis of Assisi

#life

Inevitably, people tell me that poor folks are lazy or unintelligent, that they are somehow deserving of their poverty. However, if you begin to look at the sociological literature on poverty, a more complex picture emerges. Poverty and unemployment are part and parcel of our economic order. Without them, capitalism would cease to function effectively, and in order to continue to function, the system itself must produce poverty and an army of underemployed or unemployed people. ↗

— Bob Torres

#economics #marxism #poverty #sociology #sociology