Cesar Chavez - Ivy Compton-Burnett - Christopher Hitchens - Edward Kennedy - Lord Byron - Philip Larkin - Malcolm X - John Pilger - The Sopranos TV - Benjamin Disraeli - Robert Kennedy - Robert Kennedy and His Times 1985 - MLK: The Assassination Tapes TV - Martin Luther King - Proverbs - Philip Agee - Thomas Fuller - The Hollow Crown: Henry IV II TV & William Shakespeare - A J Cook - Martin Durkin - James Shikwati - Henry Mayhew - George R Sims - Percy Bysshe Shelley - Tonight TV - Tupac Shakur - Jay-Z - James A Baldwin - George Bernard Shaw - Herbert Hoover - Peter Townsend - Ronald Reagan - Mary Robinson - Will Hutton - Hugo Chavez - Samuel Johnson - George Farquhar - Woman - Paul Foot - Melvyn Bragg TV - Andrew Marr TV - Jeremy Taylor - Horace - John Steinbeck & The Grapes of Wrath 1940 - Elizabeth Gurley Flynn - Jonathan Kozol - America’s Poor Kids TV - Wall Street 1987 - J K Rowling - Nelson Mandela - A J P Abdul Kalam - Mahatma Gandhi - James A Garfield - Woody Allen - Ayrton Senna - Groucho Marx - Noam Chomsky - Zora Neale Hurston - Will Self - Aristotle - Bono - Mamdouh Hamza - Charles Dickens - Virginia Woolf - Horizon TV - Housing Problems 1935 - Walter Greenwood - Marcus Aurelius - Milton Berle - Aravind Adiga - Jane Siberry - Matthew 6:25-33 - Luke 12:22-24 - Eugene V Debs - Muhammad Ali - Modern Times: For Richer For Poorer TV - Knut Hamsun - The Wolf of Wall Street 2013 - Robert Tressell - George Orwell - The Story of British Pathé TV - Pathé Pictures Presents TV - Mark Thomas Comedy Product TV - The Four Horsemen 2012 - Down and Out in America TV - Born into Brothels 2004 - Poor Kids TV - To Prison for Poverty 2014 - Plutocracy: Political Repression in the USA 2015 - Plutocracy II: Solidarity Forever 2016 - Plutocracy III: Class War 2017 - Frontline TV - The Wobblies 1979
We seek the support of all political groups and protection of the government, which is also our government, in our struggle. For too many years we have been treated like the lowest of the low. Our wages and working conditions have been determined from above, because irresponsible legislators who could have helped us, have supported the rancher’s argument that the plight of the Farm Worker was a ‘special case’. They saw the obvious effects of an unjust system, starvation wages, contractors, day hauls, forced migration, sickness, illiteracy, camps and sub-human living conditions, and acted as if they were irremediable causes. The farm worker has been abandoned to his own fate – without representation, without power – subject to mercy and caprice of the rancher. We are tired of words, of betrayals, of indifference. To the politicians we say that the years are gone when the farm worker said nothing and did nothing to help himself. From this movement shall spring leaders who shall understand us, lead us, be faithful to us, and we shall elect them to represent us. We shall be heard. Cesar Chavez, The Plan of Delano, 1965
People don’t resent having nothing nearly as much as too little. Ivy Compton-Burnett, A Family and a Fortune, 1939
The cure for poverty has a name in fact: it’s called the empowerment of women. Christopher Hitchens
Five billion dollars! Five billion dollars to the credit card companies. That’s what this bill is all about. Where do you think it comes from? People who have gone into bankruptcy. Who are those people? They are the people that have the heart attacks. They are the men and women whose jobs have been outsourced. They’re the mothers, the single mums, who aren’t getting paid back in alimony and child care support; those are the people who are being hurt! Edward Kennedy
Men are convicted of the capital crime of poverty. We must not allow mankind to be sacrificed to improvements in mechanisms. Lord Byron, defence of Luddites
I want to see them starving
The so-called working class
Their wages yearly halving
Their women stewing grass. Philip Larkin, A Dreary Little Hymn
Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth. Philip Larkin, Required Writing, 1983
Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday’s and today’s school dropouts are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did. Malcolm X
For the first time since the Great Depression, Britain the so-called Welfare State is deliberately cutting back the means of survival of its poorest and their children ... Perhaps the least understood crisis in the last few months has been that more and more impoverished parents can no longer afford to feed their children ... A Child Poverty Action group report last month stated that 5,000,000 men, women and children in Britain now have no more than £1.60 a week to spend on food. John Pilger, Smashing the Kids
Contrary to a myth long popular in the West, it’s been the poor of the world who have financed the rich and not the other way around. John Pilger, War By Other Means, 1992
In rich countries like Britain globalisation is well advanced. The disastrous selling off of the railways and the creeping privatisation of everything, from healthcare to air traffic control – the financial pages proclaim a booming economy, yet one in five British children grows up in poverty. There are almost ten million Britain living in poverty ... All over the world, millions of ordinary people are asking why they have no say in decisions that bring hardship to their lives ... Why should we accept a system of winners and losers? John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World
Poverty is a great motivator. The Sopranos s5e13: All Due Respect starring James Gandolfini & Lorriane Bracco & Edie Falco & Michael Imperioli & Dominic Chianese & Steven van Zandt & Tony Sirico & Robert Iler et al, Carmela to Tony, HBO 2004
Debt is a prolific mother of poverty and of crime. Benjamin Disraeli
I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil. Robert Kennedy
My next term will the beginning of a major effort to deal with poverty in this country. Robert Kennedy and His Times 1985 CBS starring Brad Davis & Veronica Cartwright & Cliff de Young & Ned Beatty & Beatrice Straight & Joe Pantoliano & Harris Yulin & Jeffrey Tambor & Jack Warden & River Pheonix & Jason Bateman et al, director Marvin J Chomsky, JFK
‘In our country are still perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the mists of a vast ocean of material prosperity.’ MLK: The Assassination Tapes, Dr King in Memphis, BBC 2013
The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty. The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for ‘the least of these’. Martin Luther King
And we’ve been in the mountain of indifference too long and ultimately we must be concerned about the least of these; we must be concerned about the poverty-stricken because our destinies are tied together. And somehow in the final analysis, as long as there is poverty in the world, nobody can be totally rich. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. And what affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. Martin Luther King
It is a tragic mix-up when the United States spends $500,000 for every enemy soldier killed, and only $53 annually on the victims of poverty. Martin Luther King
Poverty is not a crime. Late 16th century proverb
A considerable proportion of the developed world’s prosperity rests on paying the lowest possible prices for the poor countries’ primary products and on exporting high-cost capital and finished goods to those countries. Continuation of this kind of prosperity requires continuation of the relative gap between developed and underdeveloped countries – it means keeping poor people poor. Philip Agee, CIA Diary, 1975
Increasingly, the impoverished masses are understanding that the prosperity of the developed countries and of the privileged minorities in their own countries is founded on their poverty. ibid.
Debt is the worst poverty. Thomas Fuller
Consumption of the purse. The Hollow Crown: Henry IV part II ***** starring Jeremy Irons & Simon Russell Beale & Tom Hiddleston & Alun Armstrong & David Bamber & Julie Walters & Niamh Cusack & David Dawson & Michaelle Dockery et al, director Richard Eyre, Falstaff to boy, BBC 2012
Is this the government of Britain’s isle,
And in her heart she scorns our poverty. William Shakespeare, II Henry VI I iii 47