#overt

Why are...poor people more ready to share their goods than rich people? The answer is easy: The poor have little to lose; the rich have more to lose and they are more attached to their possessions. Poverty provides a deeper motivation for understanding your neighbors, welcoming others and attending to those who are suffering. I would go so far as to say that poverty helps you understand what happiness is, what serenity is in life. ↗

— Piero Gheddo

#attention #christianity #compassion #empathy #giving

In all Thénardier's outpourings, the words and gestures, the fury blazing in his eyes, this explosion of an evil nature brazenly exposed, the mixture of bravado and abjectness, arrogance, pettiness, rage, absurdity; the hodgepodge of genuine distress, and lying sentiment, the shamelessness of a vicious man rejoicing in viciousness, the bare crudity of an ugly soul -- in this eruption of all suffering and hatred there was something which was hideous as evil itself and still as poignant as truth. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#good-and-evil #poverty #suffering #nature

Some of the best people that ever lived have been as destitute as I am; and if you are a Christian, you ought not to consider poverty a crime. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#respect #respect

And that’s when things get messy. When people begin moving beyond charity and toward justice and solidarity with the poor and oppressed, as Jesus did, they get in trouble. Once we are actually friends with the folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity. One of my friends has a shirt marked with the words of late Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara: “When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me a communist.” Charity wins awards and applause but joining the poor gets you killed. People do not get crucified for living out of love that disrupts the social order that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them. ↗

— Shane Claiborne

#poverty #love

The obscenities of this country are not girls like you. It is the poverty which is obscene, and the criminal irresponsibility of the leaders who make this poverty a deadening reality. The obscenities in this country are the places of the rich, the new hotels made at the expense of the people, the hospitals where the poor die when they get sick because they don't have the money either for medicines or services. It is only in this light that the real definition of obscenity should be made. ↗

— F. Sionil José

#philippines #poverty #prostitution #social #women

The price of indulging yourself in your youth in the things you cannot afford is poverty and dependence in your old age. ↗

— Dorothy Dix

#age #cannot #dependence #indulging #old

For as long as our people are held hostage by controllable socio-economic forces, we cannot afford to be indifferent to the ravages of poverty in all its dimensions and ramifications. ↗

— Ibrahim Babangida

#cannot #controllable #dimensions #economic forces #forces

There was a queen that was overthrown here. So I was affected by all of that and felt profoundly grateful for the opportunity to live in Hawaii, and I set out at once to try to fit in. ↗

— Neil Abercrombie

#felt #fit #grateful #hawaii #here

As in the rankest soil the most beautiful flowers are grown, so in the dark soil of poverty the choicest flowers of humanity have developed and bloomed. ↗

— James Allen

#choicest #dark #developed #flowers #grown

If Jesus Christ came back today, He and I would get into our brown corduroys and go to the nearest jean store and overturn the racks of blue denim. ↗

— Ian Anderson

#blue #brown #came #christ #get