Slums Quotes

• The slums are not a place of despair. Its inhabitants are all working towards a better life.

  Vikas Swarup

  Despair, Better Life

  29 Copy quote

• Roses can grow in slums just as weeds can grow around mansions.

  Richard Paul Evans

  Weed, Rose, Grows

  Richard Paul Evans (2014). “A Step of Faith: A Novel”, p.37, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Beauty, Beautiful, Morning

  93 Copy quote

• The slum is the measure of civilization.

  Jacob August Riis

  Civilization, Cities

  "Introducing 'Breakdown: Americans on the Edge'” by Timothy L. O’Brien, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 1, 2012.

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• If you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.

  Spiro T. Agnew

  Stupid, Ghetto, Cities

  In Detroit Free Press 19 Oct. 1968

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• 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.

  Bono

  Inspirational, Mother, Children

  Keynote Address at the 54th National Prayer Breakfast, delivered 2 February 2006, The Hilton Washington Hotel, Washington, D.C.

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• Strengthen the rural areas and you will find less people migrating to urban areas. You give them opportunity, self respect & self confidence, they will never go to an urban slum.

  Bunker Roy

  Self Confidence, Opportunity, People

  55 Copy quote

• I was born in a slum, but the slum wasn't born in me.

  Jesse Jackson

  Born

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• 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

  Children, Drinking, Reality

  9 Copy quote

• When you come up in the slums, having nothin make you humble

  Kevin Gates

  Humble, Come Up

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• The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they 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.

  Ezra Taft Benson

  Faith, Men, People

  "Born of God". Ezra Taft Benson's address at the General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, www.lds.org. October 1985.

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• 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

  Heaven, Earth, Peter

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• Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home.

  Langston Hughes

  Home, Radio, Misery

  Langston Hughes, Dolan Hubbard (2003). “The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Works for children and young adults: poetry, fiction, and other writing”, p.173, University of Missouri Press

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• Several generations of slum environment will produce a slum heredity.

  Albion Fellows Bacon

  Generations, Environment, Produce

  Albion Fellows Bacon (1914). “Beauty for Ashes, by Albion Fellows Bacon; with Numerous Illustrations”

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• It is our dream that by the time we celebrate the 75th year of independent India, all the slums are replaced by cemented houses.

  Narendra Modi

  Dream, Independent, Years

  20 Copy quote

• Government cannot close its eyes to the pollution of waters, to the erosion of soil, to the slashing of forests any more than it can close its eyes to the need for slum clearance and schools.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Nature, School, Eye

  Roosevelt, Franklin D. (1938). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: F.D. Roosevelt, 1936, Volume 5”, p.258, Best Books on

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• Favelas [slums] are not always a problem. Favelas can sometimes really be a solution.

  Eduardo Paes

  Motivation, Inspiration, Favelas

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Class, Delirium Tremens, Apathy

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• The daily lesson of slum life, visualised, reiterated, of low standards, vile living, obscenity, profanity, impurity, is bound tobe dwarfing and debasing to the children who are in the midst of it.

  Albion Fellows Bacon

  Children, Lessons, Midst

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• You can look at a slum or a peasant village, but it is only by entering into the world - by living in it -that you begin to understand what it is like to be powerless, to be like Christ.

  Penny Lernoux

  Village, Looks, Entering

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• Black is beautiful when it is a slum kid studying to enter college, when it is a man learning new skills for a new job. . . .

  Whitney M. Young

  Beautiful, Jobs, Children

  Whitney M. Young (1969). “Beyond Racism: Building an Open Society”

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• 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.

  Men, Dust, Soul

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• War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums.

  Rebecca Harding Davis

  War, Angel, May

  Rebecca Harding Davis (1904). “Rebecca Harding Davis: Writing Cultural Autobiography”, p.15, Vanderbilt University Press

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• Hate builds up from the childhood when your world was a slum, but you haven't got the right to blow it to kingdom come.

  Ray Davies

  Hate, Philosophy, Blow

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• Slum kids die slowly, their lives eroded at so languid a pace that even they would have trouble tracing the disintegration. To the children of war death explodes like a car bomb.

  Roger Rosenblatt

  Children, War, Kids

  Roger Rosenblatt (1994). “The Man in the Water: Essays and Stories”, Random House

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