Quotes About Slums

“When the Kerner Commission told white America what black America has always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation's slums, maintains them and profits by them, white America could not believe it. But it is true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free - (Chapter 9).”

— Shirley Chisholm

“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

“Opening a book in the middle of a chapter always made me feel like I was interrupting a group of strangers, wandering unannounced into their villages and apartments and taxis and slums.”

— Julie Schumacher

“As to whether Marcos is gay: Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, ... a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains.”

— Subcomandante Marcos

“Later, when they sat down and went over the figures closely, they found an interesting pattern. Adamowski had received fifty-one percent of the votes, cast by white persons. But the enormous black vote had given Daley his victory. The people who were trapped in the ghetto slums and the nightmarish public housing projects, the people who had the worst school system and were most often degraded by the Police Department, the people who received the fewest campaign promises and who were ignored as part of the campaign trail, had given him his third term. They had done it quietly, asking for nothing in return. Exactly what they got.”

— Mike Royko

“This planet was a marketplace where evil tugged murderously at its chains. Its spies were everywhere. At windy corners where young girls with knowing children's faces were selling flowers and matches, on the operating tables at the hospitals, in the slums, at railway stations, under viaducts.”

— Paul Leppin

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

— Kathy Acker

“I put his toll at a dozen, maybe as many as twenty or possibly more, and he didn't slaughter only prostitutes-or "Unfortunates," as they were called. It's also not true that he struck exclusively in the East End slums or even just in London. He killed in multiple cities, and he quickly escalated to mutilation, dismemberment and possibly cannibalism. His victim selection began to include children, and he boasted about all of it in his written communications that for the most part were ignored.”

— Patricia Cornwell

“No questions, no excuses, none of this who-am-I, what-am-I, where-am-I crap, not a grain of self-mistrust or the slightest impulse toward spiritual distinction; rather, like so many of his generation out of Newark's old Jewish slums, a man who breathed the spirit of opposition while remaining completely in accord with the ways and means of the earth. Back when”

— Philip Roth

“Perhaps I should have been a Negro. I suspect I would have been a rather large and terrifying one, continually pressing my ample thigh against the withered thighs of old white ladies in public conveyances a great deal and eliciting more than one shriek of panic. Then, too, if I were a Negro, I would not be pressured by my mother to find a good job, for no good jobs would be available. My mother herself, a worn old Negress, would be too broken by years of underpaid labor as a domestic to go out bowling at night. She and I could live most pleasantly in some moldy shack in the slums in a state of ambitionless peace, realizing contentedly that we were unwanted, that striving was meaningless.”

— John Kennedy Toole

“For years, Lebanese have known that Palestinian camps like Nahr al-Barid and Ain al-Helwe - hopeless slums crowded with generations of disenfranchised Palestinian refugees who can't go home because of Israel, and can't work because of Lebanese laws - are awash with gunmen, criminals and, since the war in Iraq, al-Qaida inspired jihadists.”

— Richard Engel

“Any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul destroying.”

— Evelyn Waugh

“There shouldn't be two Indias; we need affordable housing. There are projections that by 2017, 18.78 million will be the number of those living in slums.”

— Girija Vyas

“It's you," I said, not able to look away. "It's how I feel when I'm with you. How I think I've always felt. You're my lightning-struck heart. It doesn't matter about the cornerstone. It doesn't matter about who I am or who you are. Not to me. I think it would have always been this way for me. Even if we had never escaped the slums. Ever since the beginning. Ever since I've known you, you've struck my heart, and now I have to let you go because you're not mine to keep. I need someone that I can be strong for. But I need someone who can also be strong for me.”

— T.J. Klune

“The first Parikrma school started in a slum where there were 70,000 people living below the poverty line. Our first school was on a rooftop of a building inside the slums, a second story building, the only second story building inside the slums. And that rooftop did not have any ceiling, only half a tin sheet. That was our first school.”

— Shukla Bose

“Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.”

— Cyril Connolly

“Curitiba is not a paradise. We have all the problems that most Latin American cities have. We have slums. We have the same difficulties, but the big difference is the respect given by people due to the quality of the services which are provided.”

— Jaime Lerner

“We make violent cops, we make violent criminals, and no wonder we have shootouts in slums all of the time.”

— Jose Padilha

“There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words.”

— Anonymous.

“The Queen of Terrasen was in a fighting pit in the slums of Rifthold.”

— Sarah J. Maas

“We leave this behind in your capable hands, for in the black-foaming gutters and back alleys of paradise, in the dank windowless gloom of some galactic cellar, in the hollow pearly whorls found in sewer like seas, in starless cities of insanity, and in their slums ... my awe-struck little deer and I have gone frolicking.”

— Thomas Ligotti

“It's a mistake to assume that Islamists always come from the slums. Indeed, many come from affluent families but for some reason just couldn't manage to integrate into Western society, even though they had good opportunities for advancement.”

— Otto Schily

“Filipinos want beauty. I have to look beautiful so that the poor Filipinos will have a star to look at from their slums.”

— Imelda Marcos

“Violent revolts are generated by revolting conditions and there is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a large segment of people who feel they have no stake in it, who feel they have nothing to lose. To the young victim of the slums, this society has so limited the alternatives of his life that the expression of his manhood is reduced to the ability to defend himself physically.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Our Bar franchise program, which seeks to lift sales by targeting entrepreneurs in Brazil's slums, known as favelas. The company helps spruce up taverns and ofers management training. It's joining retailers and other businesses trying to reach out to the new middle class in Brazil's gritty neighborhoods in and around its big cities.”

— Anonymous.

“The film that changed my life is a 1951 film by Vittorio De Sica, 'Miracle in Milan.' It's a remarkable comment on slums, poverty and aspiration.”

— Beeban Kidron

“The Particular End is to carry Christ into the homes and streets of the slums, among the sick, dying, the beggars and the little street children. The sick will be nursed as far as possible in their poor homes. The little children will have a school in the slums. The beggars will be sought and visited in their holes outside the town or on the streets. She would later elaborate and broaden the text to read, "Our particular mission is to labour at the salvation and sanctification of the poorest of the poor, not only in the slums, but also all over the world wherever they may be."10”

— Mother Teresa

“People were consuming on average less calories after the war than during the war. Things were still very tough. If you look at the film footage of London streets, even in areas which weren't slums, there are kids in the streets who are dirty and have no shoes on. It was rough. There was a real edge.”

— Sara Sheridan

“The poet Gary Snyder's finely unpoetic image of composting is useful here. Stuff goes into the writer, a whole lot of stuff, not notes in a notebook but everything seen and heard and felt all day every day, a lot of garbage, leftovers, dead leaves, eyes of potatoes, artichoke stems, forests, streets, rooms in slums, mountain ranges, voices, screams, dreams, whispers, smells, blows, eyes, gaits, gestures, the touch of a hand, a whistle in the night, the slant of light on the wall of a child's room, a fin in a waste of waters. All this stuff goes down into the novelist's personal compost bin, where it combines, recombines, changes; gets dark, mulchy, fertile, turns into ground. A seed falls into it, the ground nourishes the seed with the richness that went into it, and something grows. But what grows isn't an artichoke stem and a potato eye and a gesture. It's a new thing, a new whole. It's made up.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“My grandfather was Scottish, born in the slums of Glasgow.”

— Trinny Woodall

“He had had a beautiful and eager young wife and another man had taken her away from him and had fathered his child, and all he had done was to walk away, leaving her in possession of everything he owned, and crawl into a hole in the slums and lie there like a wounded animal and let his intellect bleed away into pious drivel and his strength bleed away into weakness. And he had been good. But his goodness had told me nothing except that I could not live by it. My new father, however, had not been good. He had cuckolded a friend, betrayed a wife, taken a bride, driven a man, though unwittingly, to death. But he had done good.”

— Robert Penn Warren

“For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.”

— Lewis Hyde

“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

“Place for an artist to live is the North End. If any aesthete were sincere, he'd put up with the slums for the sake of the massed traditions. God, man! Don't you realize that places like that weren't merely made, but actually grew? Generation after generation lived and felt and died there, and in days when people weren't afraid to live and fed and die. Don't you know there was a mill on Copp's Hill in 1632, and that half the present streets were laid out by 1650?”

— H.P. Lovecraft

“We're capable of understanding that someone has to drop an atomic bomb on a town of innocent civilians, but not that others have to cut up prostitutes who spread disease and moral depravity in the slums of London. Hence we call the former realism and the latter madness.”

— Jo Nesbo

“Over 1 billion people have no access to clean drinking water, and more than 2.9 billion have no access to sanitation services. The reality is that a child dies every eight seconds from drinking contaminated water, and the sanitation trend is getting sharply worse, mostly because of the worldwide drift of the rural peasantry to urban slums.”

— Marq De Villiers

“If I define my neighbor as the one I must go out to look for, on the highways and byways, in the factories and slums, on the farms and in the mines, then my world changes.”

— Gustavo Gutiérrez

“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

“The employment of children is doing more to fill prisons, insane asylums, almshouses, reformatories, slums, and gin shops than all the efforts of reformers are doing to improve society.”

— Mother Jones

“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.

“The other day I dreamed that I was at the gates of heaven. And St. Peter said, 'Go back to Earth, there are no slums up here.'”

— Mother Teresa

“As each Sister is to become a Co-Worker of Christ in the slums, each ought to understand what God and the Missionaries of Charity expect from her. Let Christ radiate and live his life in her and through her in the slums. Let the poor, seeing her, be drawn to Christ and invite him to enter their homes and their lives. Let the sick and suffering find in her a real angel of comfort and consolation. Let the little ones of the streets cling to her because she reminds them of him, the friend of the little ones.”

— Mother Teresa

“It is our dream that by the time we celebrate the 75th year of independent India, all the slums are replaced by cemented houses.”

— Narendra Modi

“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

“I've been called to the slums of the streets and the ditches of the world.”

— Franklin Graham

“The real slums are another matter. The bad parts of Tondo are as bad as any place I've seen, ancient, filthy houses swarmed with the poor and stinking of sewage and trash. But there are worse parts - squatter areas where people live under cardboard, in shipping crates, behind tacked-up newspapers. Dad would march you straight to the basement with a hairbrush in his hand if he caught you keeping your hamster cage like this.”

— P. J. O'Rourke

“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

“There is something patently insane about all the typewriters sleeping with all the beautiful plumbing in the beautiful office buildings -and all the people sleeping in the slums.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

“I have visited sweatshops, factories, and crowded slums. If I could not see it, I could smell it. The foundation of society is laid upon a basis of ... individualism, conquest and exploitation ... A social order such as this, built upon such wrong and basic principles, is bound to retard the development of all. The output of a cotton mill or a coal mine is considered of greater importance than the production of healthy, happy-hearted and free human beings. We, the people, are not free. Our democracy is but a name.”

— Helen Keller

“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