#poverty

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished. It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#criminal-justice-system #cycle-of-violence #desperation #greed #homelessness

We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without. ↗

— Immanuel Kant

#poverty #riches #rich

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#misery #poverty #poverty

It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar, that, whenever we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation—of loneliness, poverty, and misery, the end and extreme of things—the thought of God comes into one's mind. ↗

— Vincent Van Gogh

#poverty

What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds! ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#poetry #stars #poverty

The wealth of a soul is measured by how much it can feel... its poverty by how little. ↗

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

#soul #wealth #poverty

History is written by the rich, and so the poor get blamed for everything. ↗

— Jeffrey D. Sachs

#condition #human #maldistribution #poor #poverty

In the past, we spoke of poverty, misery only in the south. Now there is a lot of misery, a lot of bad that creates victims in the north as well. This has become manifest: the global system was not made to serve the good of all, but to serve multinational companies. ↗

— Ahmed Ben Bella

#become #companies #creates #global #good

Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible. ↗

— Isaiah Berlin

#cured #evils #fighting #goals #ignorance

I grew up below the poverty line; I didn't have as much as other people did. I think it made me stronger as a person, it built my character. Now I have a 4.0 grade point average and I want to go to college, and just become a better person. ↗

— Justin Bieber

#become #below #better #better person #built