Squalor Quotes - Page 2

Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soulless army of human prey.

Emma Goldman

Army, America, Joy

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So, is there hope for a truly democratic Africa? Long answer: Only if continent-wide improvements in education, human rights and public health are coupled with an aggressive and far-sighted debt-relief program that breaks the cycle of subsistence farming and urban squalor. Short answer: No.

Jon Stewart

Rights, Long, Relief

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Better a sovereign in squalor than a slave in splendor.

Donald James

Sovereign, Splendor, Slave

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Not only did I rediscover every experience of my life, I had to live each unfulfilled desire as well—as though they’d been fulfilled. I saw that what transpires in the mind is just as real as any flesh and blood occurrence. What had only been imagination in life, now became tangible, each fantasy a full reality. I lived them all—while, at the same time, standing to the side, a witness to their, often, intimate squalor. A witness cursed with total objectivity.

Richard Matheson

Real, Objectivity, Blood

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all the small squalors of the body, known only to oneself, insignificant in youth, easily dismissed, in old age became dominant and entered into fulfilment of the tyranny they had always threatened.

Vita Sackville-West

Age, Body, Youth

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Having been issued the false prospectus of happiness through unlimited sex, modern man concludes, when he is not happy with his life, that his sex has not been unlimited enough. If welfare does not eliminate squalor, we need more welfare; if sex does not bring happiness, we need more sex.

Anthony Daniels

Sex, Men, Doe

"All Sex, All the Time". www.city-journal.org. Summer 2000.

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In the invincible and indescribable squalor of Harlem ... I was tormented. I felt caged, like an animal. I wanted to escape. I felt if I did not get out I would slowly strangle.

James A. Baldwin

Animal, Harlem, Invincible

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I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it.

Tahir Shah

Travel, Poverty, Becoming

FaceBook post by Tahir Shah from Apr 15, 2013

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I absolutely relate to being alone in squalor, trying to come up with something adequate. I relate to that, and I've been known to crawl out of bed and drink out of a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke.

Diablo Cody

Trying, Bed, Bottles

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For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and - by some sad, strange irony - it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.

E. M. Forster

Gratitude, Children, Love Life

E. M. Forster (2015). “Where Angels Fear to Tread”, p.109, Booklassic

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Was it love of people?' I asked her. 'Of course no,' she snapped sharply. 'How can you love ignorant, brutish people whom you don't even know? Can anyone love filth and squalor? Or lice and rats? Who can love aching weariness, and carry on working, in spite of it? One cannot love these things. One can only love God, and through His grace come to love His people.

Jennifer Worth

People, Grace, Ignorant

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It is just as important to bring people the evidence of the beauty of the world of nature and of man as it is to give them a document of ugliness, squalor, and despair.

Ansel Adams

Photography, Men, Giving

Ansel Adams, Mary Street Alinder (2017). “Ansel Adams: An Autobiography”, p.238, Hachette UK

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South Africa is such a fraught place to live. The anxiety about crime, the crunching on racial eggshells, the juxtaposition of First World materialism with Third World squalor.

Rory Carroll

Anxiety, Racist, World

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Straightforwardness and simplicity are in keeping with goodness. The things that are essential are acquired with little bother; it is the luxuries that call for toil and effort. To want simply what is enough nowadays suggests to people primitiveness and squalor.

Seneca the Younger

Luxury, People, Simplicity

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People get frightened that success is going to take them out of life. They're no longer going to be on the corner of Bedlam and Squalor; life will only be something you can get through the mail.

Tom Waits

Art, People, Mail

"Tom Waits - Eccentric in the Very Best Sense". Interview with Charles Champlin, articles.latimes.com. January 14, 1988.

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Suppose we took a thousand negatives...
combining the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city - that would be my favorite picture.

Berenice Abbott

Past, Cities, Curiosity

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No one is demonizing or even saying anything as intemperate as Donald Trump has said about blacks living in squalor conditions.

Donna Brazile

Trump, Said, Conditions

"This Week" with George Stephanopoulos, abcnews.go.com. August 28, 2016.

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To travel only a few blocks in his own homeland, an elderly grandfather waits to beg for the whim of a teenage soldier. More than an emergency is required to get to a hospital; less than a crime earns a trip to jail.

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The lucky ones have a permit to leave their squalor to work in the cities, but luck runs out when security closes all checkpoints, paralyzing an entire people. The indignities, dependence and anger are all too familiar.

Desmond Tutu

Running, Teenage, Block

"An international campaign : Build moral pressure to end the occupation" by Desmond Tutu, www.nytimes.com. June 14, 2002.

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That is the American experiment. An ethnic group arriving on America's shores, to be reviled and hazed, living in squalor, or if they are lucky Squalor Heights, working hard to give their children or grandchildren the opportunity to sh*t on the next group landing on our shores.

Jon Stewart

Children, Opportunity, America

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