Quotes & Sayings About Slums

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

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial. — Martin Luther King Jr.

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

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

We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love. — Madeleine L'Engle

I heard the call to give up all and follow Christ into the slums to serve Him among the poorest of the poor. It was an order. — Mother Teresa

The sexual license prevalent among {the} Sixties generation was deplorable, but no more so than predatory Capitalism, with cruel slums alongsideabsurd affluence: affluence which paid for...depictions of the Holy Family as a form of expiation. Love was the basis for what he believed. Promiscuity certainly violated that polestar, yet caring for others, even in "fooling around"--which was not to justify it--topped dog-eat-dog Capitalism. — Edward Hoagland

You can use up all the slums for new development. In all the cities of the world, there are large areas of these. Also, you can avoid the spread of these silly suburban houses. Chicago has thousands of them all over the place. — Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

So we wait?" asked Severard.
"We wait, and we look to our defences. That and we try to find some money. Do you have any cash, Severard?"
"I did have some. I gave it to a girl, down in the slums."
"Ah. Shame."
"Not really, she fucks like a madman. I'd thoroughly recommend her, if you're interested."
Glokta winced as his knee clicked. "What a thoroughly heartwarming tale, Severard, I never had you down for a romantic. I'd sing a ballad if I wasn't so short of funds."
"I could ask around. How much are we talking about?"
"Oh, not much. Say, half a million marks?"
One of the Practical's eyebrows went up sharply. He reached into his pocket, dug around for a moment, pulled his hand out and opened it. A few copper coins shone in his palm.
"Twelve bits," he said. "Twelve bits is all I can raise. — Joe Abercrombie

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

Across the globe, one billion people live in slums: that is, one in seven human beings. — Paul Mason

Slums could be thought of as the development of a special organ, or they could be thought of as a tumor that's grown, and in some ways is unhealthy and could ultimately lead to the city's destruction. My own feeling is that slums are probably a bit of both. — Geoffrey West

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

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

I have walked the streets of New York and the slums of Nowhere ... and I have loved them both. It wasn't the place but the people that made them perfect. — Shelley K. Wall

The black masses want not to be shrunk from as though they are plague-ridden. They want not to be walled up in slums, in the ghettos, like animals. They want to live in an open, free society where they can walk with their heads up, like men, and women! Few white people realize that many black people today dislike and avoid spending more time than they must about white people. This 'integration' image, as it is popularly interpreted, has millions of vain, self-exalted white people convinced that black people want to sleep in bed with them - and that's a lie! — Malcolm X

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

I know the world is filled with troubles and many injustices. But reality is as beautiful as it is ugly. I think it is just as important to sing about beautiful mornings as it is to talk about slums. I just couldn't write anything without hope in it. — Oscar Hammerstein II

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

War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums. — Rebecca Harding Davis

Except for its worst inner-city slums, America is not the primitive capitalist jungle of European imagination, where human beings slink away like wounded animals to die in bloodstained holes. — Timothy Garton Ash

The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums. — George Santayana

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.

We can't have it so there are skyscrapers side by side with slums. — Li Keqiang

Only education can empty the workhouses and prisons, the slums and rookeries. — Jennifer Donnelly

In Rio, 1.4 million of the 6.3 million people live in favelas, or slums. They are all over the city, but favelas are not always a problem - sometimes they can be a solution, if you have the right public policies. — Eduardo Paes

Tiresome people, but he knew it was only human nature to believe it best to ignore suffering, to focus on your own good fortune. The human survival mechanism: to say your prayers, thank your gods, and hold your breath when you passed the slums. The sweet poison of privelege, wasn't it? To think blindness a preferable condition. — Sunil Yapa

My grandfather was Scottish, born in the slums of Glasgow. — Trinny Woodall

The slums of paradise are better than the mansions of Earth. — Matshona Dhliwayo

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

The slums of one nation are the suburbs of another. — Matshona Dhliwayo

America is the one rich country with the biggest slums, the least democratic and least developed health system, and the most niggardly attitude against its old people. — Gunnar Myrdal

The cat of the slums and alleys, starved, outcast, harried, still keeps amid the prowlings of its adversity the bold, free, panther-tread with which it paced of yore the temple courts of Thebes, still displays the self-reliant watchfulness which man has never taught it to lay aside. — Hector Hugh Munro

The proximity of these two cultures over the course of many generations presented both sides with a stark choice about how to live. By the end of the nineteenth century, factories were being built in Chicago and slums were taking root in New York while Indians fought with spears and tomahawks a thousand miles away. It may say something about human nature that a surprising number of Americans - mostly men - wound up joining Indian society rather than staying in their own. They emulated Indians, married them, were adopted by them, and on some occasions even fought alongside them. And the opposite almost never happened: Indians almost never ran away to join white society. Emigration always seemed to go from the civilized to the tribal, and it left Western thinkers flummoxed about how to explain such an apparent rejection of their society. When — Sebastian Junger

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

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

Jesus got me through the slums without getting murdered. I just walked with him as though he were really there and not a spirit just floating around. — Larry Norman

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

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

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

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

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

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium. — Cyril Connolly

A quiet meow echoes on the other side of the door though, and I can't help thinking the cat is calling out for help. I left Avery here in the slums and someone murdered her in the middle of the night. The cat is calling out for me to help his poor dead owner. — Izzy Sweet

From Sunbelt to Rustbelt, North to South, East to West, once-thriving cities have become little more than drug-infested slums. — Gerald Celente

When you come up in the slums, having nothin make you humble — Kevin Gates

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 adjective sleazy must have acquired its present-day meaning to conform to its sound shape. A word cannot exist in slums, surrounded by slatterns and sluts, and preserve its purity amid all this slime. — Anatoly Liberman

Miss Appleby, her library books, and her story-telling sessions were very popular with all the children in Heavenly Valley. To Nancy and Plum they were a magic carpet that whisked them out of the dreariness and drudgery of their lives at Mrs. Monday's and transported them to palaces in India, canals in Holland, pioneer stockades during the Indian wars, cattle ranches in the West, mountains in Switzerland, pagodas in China, igloos in Alaska, jungles in Africa, castles in England, slums in London, gardens in Japan, or most important of all, into happy homes where there were mothers and fathers and no Mrs. Mondays or Marybelles. — Betty MacDonald

A religion true to its nature must also be concerned about man's social conditions ... A ny religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion. — Martin Luther King Jr.

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

While chasing birds, he had hitchhiked through some of the most desolate places imaginable. Nicaraguan jungles, Indian slums, Samoa fruit bat colonies. But when asked to name the least likable place he'd seen in the world, he instantly pointed to an affluent California suburb: Walnut Creek, no question. — Susan Casey

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

I think it is just as important to sing about beautiful mornings as it is to talk about slums. I just couldn't write anything without hope in it. ~ Oscar Hammerstein — Oscar Hammerstein II

Beware the ends of the earth and the exotic: the drama is on your doorstep wherever the slums; are, wherever there is malnutrition, wherever there is exploitation and cruelty. — John Grierson

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

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

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

Wildness and silence disappeared from the countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fall but because throughways had to floor the meadows with cement to carry the automobiles which advancing technology produced. Tropical beaches turned into high-priced slums where thousand-room hotels elbowed each other for glimpses of once-famous surf not because those who loved the beaches wanted them there but because enormous jets could bring a million tourists every year - and therefore did. — Archibald MacLeish

Not in San Salvador, he thinks, where the shanty slums press against gleaming high-rises like the thatched huts of medieval peasants pressed against castle walls. Except these castle walls are patrolled by private security guards wielding automatic rifles and machine pistols. And at night, the guards venture out from the castle walls and ride through the villages ...and slaughter the peasants, leaving their bodies at crossroads and in the middle of village squares, and rape and kill women and execute children in front of their parents.

So the survivors will know their place.

It's a killing ground, Art thinks.

El Salvador.

The Savior, my ass. — Don Winslow

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

Soaring at this altitude, I saw Elsace as something so much cleaner. Lakes turned to puddles, cities into toys. The squalor of the slums went invisible and everything smelled fresh like rain. It was one of the reasons I loved the Wastrel. I felt so far away from all that misery down below. — Meg Merriet

In India, we have a saying: 'Always look down, never look up," he said. "When you are trying to determine where you stand in life, don't look upward at the rich people, the people with everything. Look downward at the people who have nothing, those begging on the street, those living in the slums. There's no end to looking up and feeling badly. And if you try to spit upward it only falls down upon your own face. Only by looking down do you understand your dharma. — Alison Singh Gee

The battle for the gospel in the opening years of the twenty-first century is being fought not primarily in the lecture rooms of North American seminaries but in the shanty towns, urban slums and villages of Africa, Asia and Latin America. — Brian Stanley

We make violent cops, we make violent criminals, and no wonder we have shootouts in slums all of the time. — Jose Padilha

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

The Bolshevists would blow up the fabric with high explosive, with horror. Others would pull down with the crowbars and with cranks
especially with cranks ... Sweating, slums, the sense of semi-slavery in labour, must go. We must cultivate a sense of manhood by treating men as men. — David Lloyd George

Life isn't about having, it's about being. You could surround yourself with all that money can buy, and you'd still be as miserable as a human can be. I know people with perfect bodies who don't have half the happiness I've found. On my journeys I've seen more joy in the slums of Mumbai and the orphanages of Africa than in wealthy gated communities and on sprawling estates worth millions. Why is that? You'll find contentment when your talents and passion are completely engaged, in full force. Recognise instant self-gratification for what it is. Resist the temptation to grab for material objects like the perfect house, the coolest clothes or the hottest car. The if I just had X, I would be happy syndrome is a mass delusion. When you look for happiness in mere objects, they are never enough. Look around. Look within. — Nick Vujicic

It seemed impossible that a modern airport, full of prosperous and purposeful travellers, was only kilometres away from those crushed and cindered dreams. My first impression was that some catastrophe had taken place, and that the slums were refugee camps for the shambling survivors. I learned, months later, that they were survivors, of course, those slum-dwellers: the catastrophes that had driven them to the slums from their villages were poverty, famine, and bloodshed. And five thousand new survivors arrived in the city every week, week after week, year after year. As the kilometres wound — Gregory David Roberts

This rose of pearl-coated infinity transforms the diseased slums of a broken heart into a palace made of psalms and gold. — Aberjhani

On that day, in jungle hamlets and mountain villages, in cacophonous slums and sprawling refugee camps, on worn concrete floors and under roofs thatched of rice straw and banana leaves, in clay brick homes, on rutted, red dirt roads, and on scorching swaths of sand, children cried and screamed and sang and giggled and toddled and ran and fell and got back up and climbed on their mothers' laps and pulled their siblings' hair and gazed out in wonder at the big, bright world that swirled around them. Millions of boys and girls whose lives were reclaimed whose stories were allowed to continue, who were not mourned or grieved or buried, but instead were loved and held and fretted over and scolded and prepared for the challenges of living, of surviving, all because of a man they had never met and whose name they would likely never know. — Adam Fifield

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

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

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

I looked at the people, then, and I saw how busy they were - how much industry and energy described their lives. — Gregory David Roberts

Tourists and transients lived in hotels and motels along the waterfront. Behind them a belt of slums lay ten blocks deep, where the darker half of the population lived and died. On the other side of the tracks - the tracks were there - the business section wore its old Spanish facades like icing on a stale cake. — Ross Macdonald

He has known joy and violence. Felt the warmth of children and the cruelty of abuse. He has nearly died saving lives and merely been killed by a drunken act. He has known the finery of grand estates and the filth of stinking slums. He has survived fire and flood, starvation and torment. And nothing could break his spirit-or his great love. This is HIS life. He is called the horse. — Anna Sewell

India went through a dramatic revolution after the '90s when our economy started opening up for the first time and Indians were now experiencing the Western life, if you will. Drugs and sex and a lot of those influences came in as the economy stabilized, and we were growing up and experiencing that. The Indian writing market was very small at that time. Our literature was very attuned to what Western audiences were interested in, so everybody was writing about the slums in India and magic realism or stories about Hindus and Muslims and partition. — Karan Bajaj

I had a void, God. Filled with whores & with blunts. I ain't have choice God I was born in the slums — Vinnie Paz

If anyone should talk to her," Renfield piped up, "it should be me. We're the most compatible, culturewise. I'm sure that on top of feeling as if she's been thrust into one of the many levels of Hades, with all of its attendant demons, she feels like a lady wandering, lost, amongst the mannerless cads of the slums."
We were all silent for a moment before Tom asked, "You do realize that we're sitting right here, right?"
"Oh, I am horribly aware of this fact."
"Just checking. — Lia Habel

I come from the slums; I come from a hard background; I come from a poor family; and I was a soldier. — Michael Caine

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

Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid", whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy. — Richard Davenport-Hines

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

You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of the slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism. — Martin Luther King Jr.

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

The girl looks out the window, watching the gentle, familiar blue sky fade into darkness. The stars come out, slowly at first and then all together, diamond-bright, each one a new world to discover.
But no matter how long the girl looks, she feels nothing. Puzzled, she looks for the girl who wanted to be an explorer, the girl who wanted to learn deep-sea diving and mountain-climbing, the girl who wanted to travel the stars. But she can't find her. That girl died when her parents did, in a little shop in the slums of November. And now she has no soul left to shatter.
She closes the shade over the window. — Amie Kaufman

The Queen of Terrasen was in a fighting pit in the slums of Rifthold. — Sarah J. Maas

Beyond the typhoon shelters, ships slid past them, lighted buildings on the march, and the junks hobbled in their wakes. Inland, the Island whined and clanged and throbbed, and the huge slums twinkled like jewel boxes opened by the deceptive beauty of the night. Presiding over them, glimpsed between the dipping finger of the masts, sat the black Peak, Victoria, her sodden face shrouded with moonlit skeins; the goddess, the freedom, the lure of all that wild striving in the valley. They — John Le Carre

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

Everybody talks about foul dens and filthy slums in which crime can run riot; but it's just the other way. They are called foul, not because crimes are committed, but because crimes are discovered. It's in the neat, spotless, clean and tidy places that crime can run riot; no mud to make footprints; no dregs to contain poison; kind servants washing out all traces of the murder; and the murderer killing and cremating six wives and all for want of a little Christian dirt. — G.K. Chesterton

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

I've always thought cemeteries were like cities. There are streets, avenues - you've seen them, I think, Michael. There are blocks, too, and house numbers, slums and ghettos, middle-class sections and small palaces. — Peter S. Beagle

Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings. — Graham Greene

You see, I was born in the slums, that was before the ghetto. The ghetto was kind of refined; the slums was right there on the ground. — Della Reese

The average ordinary person, in the worst slums of America, someone who might even hate the law and disagree with the government, they would do something about that [abandoned child]. But in Afghanistan, people hardly have the means to take care of themselves, let alone a random child on the street. — Immortal Technique

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

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

There was to be nothing special about it, nothing that savored of a religious Order, no special rule, no distinctive habit. She, and those who joined her, would simply be poor
there was no choice on that score, for they were that already
but they would embrace their poverty, and the life of the proletariat in all its misery and insecurity and dead, drab monotony. They would live and work in the slums, lose themselves, in the huge anonymous mass of the forgotten and the derelict, for the only purpose of living the complete, integral Christian life in that environment
loving those around them, sacrificing themselves for those around them, and spreading the Gospel and the truth of Christ most of all by being saints, by living in union with Him, by being full of His Holy Ghost, His charity. — Thomas Merton

I've been called to the slums of the streets and the ditches of the world. — Franklin Graham