A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondency, an odious approximation, a haunting... conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity.... He is known by his knock.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 »