Slums Quotes

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

“Urban landlords quickly realized that piles of money could be made by creating slums: “maximum profits came, not from providing first-class accommodations for those who could well afford them… but from crowded slum accommodations, for those whose pennies were scarcer than the rich man’s pounds.” Beginning in the sixteenth century, slum housing would be reserved not only for outcasts, beggars, and thieves but for a large segment of the population.”

“Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid", whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy.”

“She fell on the bread and cheese as if she were a lioness. Did lions eat cheese? He didn’t know. He knew Mrs Prater’s kitten ate cheese. He ate anything. Poor bloody animal. Still, he was a slum cat, no reason why his life should be better than a humans' sad ruddy existence.”

“He ended the world because it was not to his liking and here I am challenging the same monster for a fifteen-year-old rat from the slums”

“Filipinos want beauty. I have to look beautiful so that the poor Filipinos will have a star to look at from their slums.”

“This rose of pearl-coated infinity transformsthe diseased slums of a broken heartinto a palace made of psalms and gold.”

“America is the one rich country with the biggest slums, the least democratic and least developed health system, and the most niggardly attitude against its old people.”

“One of the remarkable things about slums is that they do develop their own social organization and economy and even culture that is, on some level, functional and in some cases, remarkably resilient. This is kind of amazing.”