#overt

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks. This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines? ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#colonialism #imperialism #inequality #poverty #race

For Ragamuffins, God's name is Mercy. We see our darkness as a prized possession because it drives us into the heart of God. Without mercy our darkness would plunge us into despair - for some, self-destruction. Time alone with God reveals the unfathomable depths of the poverty of the spirit. We are so poor that even our poverty is not our own: It belongs to the mysterium tremendum of a loving God. ↗

— Brennan Manning

#mercy #poverty #prayer #ragamuffin #spirit

One of the great failings of the American education system (in our view) is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad. ↗

— Nicholas D. Kristof

#poverty #service #education

(So I heard the boom of my fathr's rifle when he shot my best friend.) A bullet only costs about two cents, and anybody can afford that.(14) ↗

— Sherman Alexie

#death #friendship #poor #poverty #death

This is the basis for the most important critique of microfinance. The poor are not entrepreneurs. The idea that more than a few will turn tiny loans into a viable business is simply unrealistic. ↗

— Ian Smillie

#economics #ian-smillie #microfinance #poor #poverty

cross-national studies show that the U.S. poverty rate, which stands persistently above 12 percent, is not only the highest poverty rate of any advanced industrial nation, but is more than twice the average for that group. Pursuing the American Dream, 9, 276 ↗

— Cal Jillson

#poverty #dreams

Th direct elimination of elimination of poverty should be the objective of all development aid. Development should be viewed as a human rights issue, not as a question of simply increasing the gross national product (GNP). ↗

— Muhammad Yunus

#economics #poverty #poverty-alleviation #social-change #change

What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month, and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are generally given 'class' labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing 'class' makes class itself a nebulous concept. Yet the intelligentsia are habituated, if not addicted, to seeing the world in class terms. ↗

— Thomas Sowell

#class-warfare #politics #poverty #change

..things are never as complicated as they seem. It is only our arrogance that prompts us to find unnecessarily complicated answers to simple problems. ↗

— Muhammad Yunus

#complication #poverty-alleviation #simplicity #social-change #change

Because to the poor, books are not diversions. Book are siege weapons. ↗

— Joe Queenan

#poverty #diversity