This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
To all the members of the Church, the people of life and for life, I make this most urgent appeal, To choose life involves rejecting every form of violence: the violence of poverty and hunger, which afflicts so many human beings; the violence of armed conflict; the violence of criminal trafficking in drugs and arms; the violence of mindless damage to the natural environment.
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution.
Poverty |
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
I grew up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium, that hard work was the secret of success: Work hard and you'll get ahead or It's hard work that got us where we are. No one ever said that you could work hard - harder even than you ever thought possible - and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
The discovery of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the discovery of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.
Beginning | Discovery | People | Plenty | Poverty | Discovery |
There are 4 billion cell phones in use today. Many of them are in the hands of market vendors, rickshaw drivers, and others who've historically lacked access to education and opportunity. Information networks have become a great leveler, and we should use them together to help lift people out of poverty and give them a freedom from want.
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
My aim here was much more straightforward and objective — just to see whether I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day. Besides, I've had enough unchosen encounters with poverty in my lifetime to know it's not a place you would want to visit for touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear.
Jewish Science combats the fear of poverty by emphasizing the fact that true wealth lies in the acquisition of spiritual riches. Material riches is not life, it is only a means for living. To value life by wealth is to degrade it. Trust in God and He will satisfy all your needs. He has prepared sustenance for all those to whom He gave life. He has placed it within their reach and has given them the power to go and obtain it. Just as He has prepared sustenance for all the birds, but, having given them the means of obtaining it through their own efforts, has not thrown it into their nests ; so, with the same end, He has endowed man with the necessary tools to dig and labor for his bread. It is the process of obtaining his necessities that develops man and makes life interesting. A life of simple comfort, obtained through one's own efforts, a life free from forebodings and fear, is a goal to be desired more ardently than a superabundance of wealth and luxury.
Fear | God | Labor | Life | Life | Man | Means | Poverty | Power | Riches | Science | Trust | Wealth | Will | Riches | God | Value |
As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.
Poverty |
Because of its increasing triviality, everyday life has gradually become our central preoccupation. No illusion, sacred or deconsecrated, collective or individual, can hide the poverty of our daily actions any longer. The enrichment of life calls inexorably for the analysis of the new forms taken by poverty, and the perfection of the old weapons of refusal.
Life | Life | Perfection | Poverty | Sacred | Weapons | Old |
The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.
Alienation | Life | Life | Means | Organization | Poverty | Slavery |
Philosophy is a proud, sullen detector of the poverty and misery of man. It may turn him from the world with a proud, sturdy contempt; but it cannot come forward and say, here are rest, grace, pardon, peace, strength, and consolation.
Whatsoever is good for God's children they shall have it, for all is theirs to further them to heaven; therefore, if poverty be good, they shall have it; if disgrace be good, they shall have it; if crosses be good, they shall have them; if misery be good, they shall have it; for all is ours, to serve for our greatest good.
All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
Millions who endure poverty and bad government can now know what they are missing. To see how the other half lives all they have to do is switch on their television sets.
Government | Poverty | Television | Government |
The U.S., for historical reasons, mistrusts the concept of a welfare state, and this mistrust shows itself nakedly under present US government, which commits uncounted billions of the national wealth to what it calls defense, and is close-fisted in giving money to plans which would ameliorate the grinding poverty of a great part of its people. Quite simply, in Canada you could not get away with that.
Robert Bellah, fully Robert Neelly Bellah
We have imagined ourselves a special creation, set apart from other humans. In the last twentieth century, we see that our poverty is as absolute as that of the poorest nations. We have attempted to deny the human condition in our quest for power after power. It would be well for us to rejoin the human race, to accept our essential poverty as a gift, and to share our material wealth with those in need.
Robert Hass, aka The Bard of Berkeley
A Faint Music - Maybe you need to write a poem about grace. When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine has studied her face and its defects remorselessly, and the pain they thought might, as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves has lost its novelty and not released them, and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly, watching the others go about their days— likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears— that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming, and understood, therefore, why they had been, all their lives, in such a fury to defend it, and that no one— except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light, faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears. As in the story a friend told once about the time he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him. Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash. He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge, the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon. And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,” that there was something faintly ridiculous about it. No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass, scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs, and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up on the girder like a child—the sun was going down and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing carefully, and drove home to an empty house. There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed. A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick with rage and grief. He knew more or less where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill. They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,” she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights, a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay. “You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?” “Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now, “I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while— Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall— and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more, and go to sleep. And he, he would play that scene once only, once and a half, and tell himself that he was going to carry it for a very long time and that there was nothing he could do but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark cracking and curling as the cold came up. It’s not the story though, not the friend leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,” which is the part of stories one never quite believes. I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps— First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.
Friend | Fury | Good | Grace | Hero | Kill | Little | Music | Need | Nothing | Novelty | Order | Pain | Play | Poverty | Rage | Reason | Self-love | Story | Thought | Novelty | Poem | Thought |
Robert Hass, aka The Bard of Berkeley
When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine has studied her face and its defects remorselessly, and the pain they thought might, as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves has lost its novelty and not released them, and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly, watching the others go about their days— likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears— that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming, and understood, therefore, why they had been, all their lives, in such a fury to defend it, and that no one— except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light, faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.
Fury | Grace | Hero | Music | Novelty | Pain | Poverty | Self-love | Thought | Novelty | Thought |