Slums Quotes

1. "This rose of pearl-coated infinity transformsthe diseased slums of a broken heartinto a palace made of psalms and gold."
Author: Aberjhani

2. "God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them."
Author: Bono

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

4. "As far as service goes, it can take the form of a million things. To do service, you don't have to be a doctor working in the slums for free, or become a social worker. Your position in life and what you do doesn't matter as much as how you do what you do."
Author: Elisabeth Kubler Ross

5. "She alone was left standing, amid the accumulated riches of her mansion, while a host of men lay stricken at her feet. Like those monsters of ancient times whose fearful domains were covered with skeletons, she rested her feet on human skulls and was surrounded by catastrophes...The fly that had come from the dungheap of the slums, carrying the ferment of social decay, had poisoned all these men simply by alighting on them. It was fitting and just. She had avenged the beggars and outcasts of her world. And while, as it were, her sex rose in a halo of glory and blazed down on her prostrate victims like a rising sun shining down on a field of carnage, she remained as unconscious of her actions as a splendid animal, ignorant of the havoc she had wreaked, and as good-natured as ever."
Author: Émile Zola

6. "...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."
Author: Evelyn Waugh

7. "The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ would take the slums out of people, and then they would take themselves out of the slums.The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature."
Author: Ezra Taft Benson

8. "Filipinos want beauty. I have to look beautiful so that the poor Filipinos will have a star to look at from their slums."
Author: Imelda Marcos

9. "Five days in Nairobi slums changes you."
Author: Jacqueline Novogratz

10. "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."
Author: Jaime Lerner

11. "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."
Author: Jo Nesbø

12. "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."
Author: Joe Abercrombie

13. "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."
Author: John Grierson

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

15. "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."
Author: Julie Schumacher

16. "I was spending a lot of time in Mumbai after I met my husband, who is Indian, and while parts of the city were prospering like crazy, I couldn't quite make out how the new wealth had changed the prospects of the majority of city residents who lived in slums. So after a few years I stopped wondering and started reporting."
Author: Katherine Boo

17. "Whereas the slums in Hamburg are the slums of its sailors, Berlin is a big slum."
Author: Kathy Acker

18. "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."
Author: Larry Norman

19. "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."
Author: Lia Habel

20. "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."
Author: Madeleine L'Engle

21. "Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the fires of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until they who live on the outskirts of Hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heap of history and every family will live in a decent, sanitary home. Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will betransformed into the bright tomorrows of quality integrated education."
Author: Martin Luther King Jr.

22. "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."
Author: Mohamed ElBaradei

23. "Yes, Manila had its slums; one saw them on the drive from the airport: vast districts of men in dirty white undershirts lounging idly in front of auto-repair shops — like a poorer version of the 1950s America depicted in such films as Grease."
Author: Mohsin Hamid

24. "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."
Author: Mother Jones

25. "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."
Author: Nick Vujicic

26. "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"
Author: Oscar Hammerstein II

27. "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."
Author: Otto Schily

28. "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."
Author: Paul Leppin

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

30. "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"
Author: Philip Roth

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

32. "Roses can grow in slums just as weeds can grow around mansions."
Author: Richard Paul Evans

33. "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."
Author: Robert Penn Warren

34. "Imperialism and exploitation," he wrote, "spheres of influence, trade barriers, unequal distribution of the world's goods, starvation in the midst of plenty, slums with gold coasts next door, poverty supporting luxury: These are marks of an unChristian world."
Author: Sara Miles

35. "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)."
Author: Shirley Chisholm

36. "Yes, 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. Marcos is all the exploited, marginalised, oppressed minorities resisting and saying `Enough'. He is every minority who is now beginning to speak and every majority that must shut up and listen. He is every untolerated group searching for a way to speak. Everything that makes power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable -- this is Marcos."
Author: Subcomandante Marcos

37. "The slums are not a place of despair. Its inhabitants are all working towards a better life."
Author: Vikas Swarup

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