Squalor Quotes

• In a community where public services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Community, Atmosphere, Opulence

  John Kenneth Galbraith (1998). “The Affluent Society”, p.191, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Morality is similar to religion - it is a somniferous drug which blinds people from seeing the squalor of their lives.

  Irving Stone

  People, Drug, Morality

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• Want is one only of five giants on the road of reconstruction; the others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness.

  William Beveridge

  Ignorance, Desire, Disease

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• The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor.

  Ayn Rand

  Greatness, Novelists, Philosopher

  Ayn Rand (2016). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.382, Hamilton Books

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• Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.

  John W. Gardner

  Integrity, Men, People

  Dr. John W. Gardner (2015). “Excellence: Can We Be Equal And Excellent Too?”, p.164, Pickle Partners Publishing

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• Straightforwardness and simplicity are in keeping with goodness.

  Seneca the Younger

  Simplicity, Goodness

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• The things that are essential are acquired with little bother; it is the luxuries that call for toil and effort.

  Seneca the Younger

  Luxury, Simplicity, Effort

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• There's no question that in my lifetime, the contrast between what I called private affluence and public squalor has become very much greater. What do we worry about? We worry about our schools. We worry about our public recreational facilities. We worry about our law enforcement and our public housing. All of the things that bear upon our standard of living are in the public sector.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  School, Law, Worry

  Source: progressive.org

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• Out of its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life; yet it permitted a unique human development to so many. Nowhere were people so heightened, rounded and individualistic; nowhere did they offer themselves so fully and with such assurance. To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure. I did not want India to sink [out of my memory]; the mere thought was painful.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Memories, Adventure, Unique

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• At the foot of the mountain, the park ended and suddenly all was squalor again. I was once more struck by this strange compartmentalization that goes on in America -- a belief that no commercial activities must be allowed inside the park, but permitting unrestrained development outside, even though the landscape there may be just as outstanding. America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn't have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature.

  Bill Bryson

  Zoos, Feet, America

  Bill Bryson (1989). “The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-town America”, p.95, VNR AG

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• To want simply what is enough nowadays suggests to people primitiveness and squalor.

  Seneca the Younger

  Inspirational, People, Simplicity

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• The information age has been driven and dominated by technopreneurs. We now have to apply these technologies in saving lives, improving livelihoods and lifting millions of people out of squalor, misery and suffering. In other words, our focus must now move from the geeks to the meek.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Moving, Technology, People

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• She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity.

  Nick Laird

  Home, Authenticity, Enough

  Nick Laird (2009). “Glover's mistake”

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• Ugliness, squalor are breeding grounds for revolution. Beauty is conducive to tranquillity, happiness. Beautifying of homes and places of worship began with the dawn of civilization. Beautifying of workplaces is only in its infancy. Yet, since men normally spend more than half of their waking hours at work, surely it is important that adequate attention be devoted to elevating their working environment, whether office or factory, foundry or machine shop, mine or warehouse. Beautiful surroundings subtly encourage beautiful living. Drab surroundings, bad air, bad light, evoke bad reactions.

  B. C. Forbes

  Beautiful, Work, Home

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• In the invincible and indescribable squalor of Harlem ... I was tormented. I felt caged, like an animal. I wanted to escape. I felt if I did not get out I would slowly strangle.

  James A. Baldwin

  Animal, Harlem, Invincible

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• Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soulless army of human prey.

  Emma Goldman

  Army, America, Joy

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• all the small squalors of the body, known only to oneself, insignificant in youth, easily dismissed, in old age became dominant and entered into fulfilment of the tyranny they had always threatened.

  Vita Sackville-West

  Age, Body, Youth

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• Having been issued the false prospectus of happiness through unlimited sex, modern man concludes, when he is not happy with his life, that his sex has not been unlimited enough. If welfare does not eliminate squalor, we need more welfare; if sex does not bring happiness, we need more sex.

  Anthony Daniels

  Sex, Men, Doe

  "All Sex, All the Time". www.city-journal.org. Summer 2000.

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• Have not all theists painted their Deity as the god of love and goodness? Yet after thousands of years of such preachments the gods remain deaf to the agony of the human race. Confucius cares not for the poverty, squalor and misery of the people of China. Buddha remains undisturbed in his philosophical indifference to the famine and starvation of outraged Hindoos; Jahve continues deaf to the bitter cry of Israel; while Jesus refuses to rise from the dead against his Christians who are butchering each other.

  Emma Goldman

  Christian, Jesus, Philosophical

  Emma Goldman (1915). “Mother Earth, a Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Social Science and Literature”

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• Organisation of social insurance should be treated as one part only of a comprehensive policy of social progress. Social insurance fully developed may provide income security; it is an attack upon Want. But Want is one only of five giants on the road of reconstruction and in some ways the easiest to attack. The others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.

  William Beveridge

  Ignorance, Progress, Giants

  "Social Insurance and Allied Services". The "Beveridge Report" by William Beveridge (Part 1, 8), November 1942.

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• The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.

  W. H. Auden

  Dirty, Writing, Islands

  "The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays" by W. H. Auden, ("Writing"), (p. 22), 1962.

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• poverty is like a pain, dormant and unbearable as long as you don't move about too much. You grow used to it, you end up by paying no attention to it. But once you presume to bring it out in the daylight, it becomes terrifying, you see it at last in all its squalor and you shrink from exposing it to the sun.

  Gabrielle Roy

  Pain, Moving, Long

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• The distractions, the exhaustions, the savage noises, the demands of town life, are, for me, mortal enemies to thought, to sleep,and to study; its extremes of squalor and of splendor do not stimulate, but sadden me; certain phases of its society I profoundly value, but would sacrifice them to the heaven of country quiet, if I had to choose between.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Country, Sleep, Sacrifice

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• So, is there hope for a truly democratic Africa? Long answer: Only if continent-wide improvements in education, human rights and public health are coupled with an aggressive and far-sighted debt-relief program that breaks the cycle of subsistence farming and urban squalor. Short answer: No.

  Jon Stewart

  Rights, Long, Relief

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• Not only did I rediscover every experience of my life, I had to live each unfulfilled desire as well—as though they’d been fulfilled. I saw that what transpires in the mind is just as real as any flesh and blood occurrence. What had only been imagination in life, now became tangible, each fantasy a full reality. I lived them all—while, at the same time, standing to the side, a witness to their, often, intimate squalor. A witness cursed with total objectivity.

  Richard Matheson

  Real, Objectivity, Blood

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