My family's lives were not on television, not in books, not even comic books. There was a myth of the poor in this country, but it... did not include us, no matter how hard I tried to squeeze us in. There was an idea of the good poor--hard-working, ragged but clean, and intrinsically honorable. I understood that we were the bad poor ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... nothing seems completely to differentiate the poor but poverty. We find no adjectives to fit them, as a whole, only those of w...hich Want is the mother. "Miserable" covers many; "shabby" most, and I am sadly aware that, in a large majority of minds, "disagreeable" includes them all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ensnared in his starvation, Chaplin-man is always just below political awareness. A strike is a catastrophe for him because it thr...eatens a man truly blinded by his hunger; this man achieves an awareness of the working-class condition only when the poor man and the proletarian coincide under the gaze (and the blows) of the police.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The worthy poor. The very very worthy And beautiful poor. Perhaps just not too swarthy?... Perhaps just not too dirty nor too dim Nor--passionate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I... tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meetinghouses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies;Mthough I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is said that the Negro is ignorant. But why is he ignorant? It comes with ill grace from a man who has put out my eyes to make ...a parade of my blindness,--to reproach me for my poverty when he has wronged me of my money.... If he is poor, what has become of the money he has been earning for the last two hundred and fifty years? Years ago it was said cotton fights and cotton conquers for American slavery. The Negro helped build up that great cotton power in the South, and in the North his sigh was in the whir of its machinery, and his blood and tears upon the warp and woof of its manufactures.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »