Slums Quotes - Page 3

• I have committed myself to joy. I have come to realize that those who make space for joy, those who prefer nothing to joy, those who desire the utter reality, will most assuredly have it. We must not be afraid to announce it to refugees, slum dwellers, saddened prisoners, angry prophets. Now and then we must even announce it to ourselves. In this prison of now, in this cynical and sophisticated age, someone must believe in joy.

  Richard Rohr

  Believe, Reality, Space

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• One of the remarkable things about slums is that they do develop their own social organization and economy and even culture that is, on some level, functional and in some cases, remarkably resilient. This is kind of amazing.

  Geoffrey West

  Organization, Culture, Levels

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• Consider how badly-built suburbia is. Many business buildings are not designed to outlast their tax depreciation periods, and the McHouses are made of particle board, vinyl siding, and stapled-on trim. A lot of suburbia will simply become the slums of the future. Most of the rest will be salvage or ruins.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Ruins, Boards, Vinyl

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

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• One of the saddest sights of the slums is to see the thrifty wife of the working man, with her rosy brood of children, used to country air and sunshine, used to space, privacy, good surroundings, cleanliness, quiet, shut up amid the noise and dirt and confusion, in the gloom of the slum.

  Albion Fellows Bacon

  Country, Children, Sunshine

  Albion Fellows Bacon (1914). “Beauty for Ashes, by Albion Fellows Bacon; with Numerous Illustrations”

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• I like to call it 'the national automobile slum.' You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Motivation, Inspiration, Thinking

  "The Greatest Misallocation of Resources in the History of the World". "Placemakers" with Rebecca Sheir, www.slate.com. November 7, 2016.

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• Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.

  Ezra Taft Benson

  Men, World, Shapes

  Ezra Taft Benson (1988). “The Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson”, Bookcraft Pubs

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• All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Children, Opportunity, Soul

  Vladimir Nabokov (2010). “Lolita”, p.12, Vintage

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• The PSTN is like a well-manicured neighborhood, while the internet is like a crime-ridden slum,

  Phil Zimmermann

  Internet, Crime, Neighborhood

  "Privacy guru locks down voip" by Kim Zetter, www.wired.com. July 26, 2005.

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• This book is the best treatment of the best American Marxist philosopher-and the best philosopher to emerge from American slums. Young Sidney Hook is essential reading for anyone interested in democratic theory and practice in America.

  Cornel West

  Book, Reading, Practice

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• Once you start backing into all of that, then you see this incredibly intricate, totally wrong-headed way to do things, but nevertheless has a lot of merit to it for the fact that [Buckminster Fuller] is recognizing much larger patterns, seeking much larger patterns and seeking much larger ways of trying to solve for the problem of unhygienic conditions in slums. They really were unhygienic. Whether his family was living in the slum is debatable but they were unhygienic. That needed to be addressed. He was attempting to address it.

  Jonathon Keats

  Trying, Patterns, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and comcribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.

  Billy Sunday

  Children, Memories, Men

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• Without denying the value of scientific endeavor, there is a striking absurdity in committing billions to reach the moon where no people live, while only a fraction of that amount is appropriated to service the densely populated slums.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Moon, People, Fractions

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• Whereas the slums in Hamburg are the slums of its sailors, Berlin is a big slum.

  Kathy Acker

  Berlin, Sailor, Bigs

  Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper (2002). “Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker”, p.232, Grove Press

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• You can be slum-born and slum-bred and still achieve something worth while; but it is a stupid inverted snobbishness to be proud of it. If one had a right to be proud of anything, it would be of a continued decent tradition back of one.

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould

  Stupid, Pride, Proud

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1920). “Modes and Morals”

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• The ideas of [ Le Corbusier ] that actually found their way into practice were deeply destructive - for instance, the tower-in-a-park, which mutated into the vertical slums of the late 20th century.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Ideas, Practice, Way

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

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• It would be disastrous if bad planning policy meant that today's new developments become tomorrow's climate slums

  Tim Yeo

  Future, Vision, Today

  "Benn announces 'stronger' climate change bill" by Rosalind Ryan, Elizabeth Stewart, www.theguardian.com. October 29, 2007.

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• I just don't think the moon is going to be an adequate substitute for the fact that we haven't addressed ourselves to clearing up the slums.

  Kenneth Clark

  Moon, Thinking, Space

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• Go into the streets, into the slums, into the fashionable quarters. Go into the day courts and the night courts. Become acquainted with sorrow, with many kinds of sorrow. Learn of the wonderful heroism of the poor, of the incredible generosity of the very poor

  Minnie Maddern Fiske

  Night, Generosity, Sorrow

  Minnie Maddern Fiske, Alexander Woollcott (1917). “Mrs. Fiske: Her Views on Actors, Acting, and the Problems of Production”

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• I listen to money singing, it's like looking down from long French windows at a provincial town. The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad in the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

  Philip Larkin

  Fear, Long, Mad

  Philip Larkin (2014). “Poesía reunida”, p.279, LUMEN

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• Growing up in Kenya, slum life was not far away. I had family that lived in slums, so I visited them often, and so I've seen and interacted with abject poverty. But I also know that because of that, poverty is not the definition of the people that live there.

  Lupita Nyong'o

  Growing Up, People, Kenya

  "The Beautiful Way Lupita Nyong'o's Career Has Come 'Full Circle' With Queen of Katwe". Interview with Shannon Vestal Robson, www.popsugar.com. September 23, 2016.

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• Will urban sprawl spread so far that most people lose all touch with nature? Will the day come when the only bird a typical American child ever sees is a canary in a pet shop window? When the only wild animal he knows is a rat-glimpsed on a night drive through some city slum? When the only tree he touches is the cleverly fabricated plastic evergreen that shades his gifts on Christmas morning?

  Frank N. Ikard

  Morning, Children, Animal

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• When you have half of Caironese in slums, when you don't have clean water, when you don't have a sewer system, when you don't have electricity, and on top of that you live under one of the most repressive regimes right now... Well, put all that together, and it's a ticking bomb. It's not of a question of threat; it is question of looking around at the present environment and making a rational prognosis.

  Mohamed ElBaradei

  Water, Together, Bombs

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• But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

  Jane Jacobs

  Cities, Support, Vandalism

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• The mass is the spiritual food that sustains me, without which I could not get through one single day or hour in my life; in the mass we have Jesus in the appearance of bread. While in the slums we see Christ and touch him in the broken bodies, in the abandoned children.

  Mother Teresa

  Spiritual, Jesus, Children

  Mother Teresa (1987). “My Life for the Poor”

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• America's skyscrapers were not built by public funds nor for a public purpose: they were built by the energy, initiative and wealth of private individuals for personal profit. And, instead of impoverishing the people, these skyscrapers, as they rose higher and higher, kept raising the people's standard of living - including the inhabitants of the slums.

  Ayn Rand

  America, Rose, People

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