#pov

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat. ↗

— Mother Teresa

#eat #everybody #forgotten #greater #hunger

Britta wanted to try to turn a guard. Tamara thought it was idiotic. “What are you going to do? Buy him beer and tell him about Kropotkin?” I envisioned the conversation: Vanguard: Wage Slave, are you aware that you are but a wire nail in the toolbox of capitalism? Wage Slave: I thought I was a chisel. Vanguard: No, the petit bourgeois are the chisels. Wage Slave: What about a washer set? Can I be a washer set? Vanguard: No, my ferret, run free! For I have unlocked your collar with knowledge! Wage Slave: I want to be a chisel. Vanguard pushes screaming ferret through hole in fence cut by the clippers of noblesse oblige. “Well, maybe we could bribe him,” said Britta. Tamara laughed. “With what? Health insurance? ↗

— Vanessa Veselka

#kropotkin #marxism #anarchism

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

Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents. ↗

— Louisa May Alcott

#louisa-may-alcott

The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor. ↗

— Dorothy Day

#christianity #gospels #poor #poverty #gospel

The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment. ↗

— Derrick Jensen

#entropy #environmental-degradation #global-industrial-economy #impoverishment #economy

We will not be intimidated or pushed off the world stage by people who do not like what we stand for, and that is, freedom, democracy and the fight against disease, poverty and terrorism. ↗

— Madeleine Albright

#democracy #disease #fight #freedom #intimidated

There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap. ↗

— Sherman Alexie

#felt #gap #i #i think #know

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. ↗

— Woody Allen

#better #financial #only #poverty #reasons