24 Quotes on Living on the Margins

This past Sunday, I volunteered all afternoon at an event for Livonia Equity & Anti-Racism Network (LEARN). Twice a year, we show up at a parking lot for a long-closed Sears store and fix anyone's car lights for free. This keeps them from being pulled over for having a blinker out, thus avoiding costly fines and potentially hazardous interaction with the police.

The people who stop by are, typically, those who live at the margins. They might have a problem making ends meet. They sometimes have to choose between food and car repair. It would be hard for them to cobble together enough money (and time) to get their bulbs changed by a mechanic.

The families who stop in are grateful for the free labor. But it always gets me thinking about the Martin Luther King, Jr. quote, "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it understands that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." We need both things — to take care of our brethren who need it, and also to attack the systems that force so many people into hardship.

Contemplating all of this, I've put together this selection of quotes that discuss poverty, vulnerability, and how critical it is to support those going through either.

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.

— Herman Melville

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

Nobody wants to fall into a safety net, because it means the structure in which they've been living is in a state of collapse and they have no choice but to tumble downwards. However, it beats the alternative.

— Lemony Snicket

It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you're poor because you're stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you're stupid and ugly because you're Indian. And because you're Indian you start believing you're destined to be poor. It's an ugly circle and there's nothing you can do about it.

Poverty doesn't give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.

— Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

A husband, a wife and some kids is not a family. It's a terribly vulnerable survival unit.

— Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

We cannot have good cities unless we have a good nation. And to have a good nation, we must face, once and for all, the problems of poverty and race. Only through the formulation of a national program to eliminate poverty and racial discrimination can we lay the basis for a good, let alone a great, society.

— Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin

The bus is late. Cars drive by. Rich people in cars never look at people on the street, at all. Poor ones always do … in fact it sometimes seems they're just driving around, looking at people on the street. I've done that. Poor people wait a lot. Welfare, unemployment lines, laundromats, phone booths, emergency rooms, jails, etc.

— Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

Caring for each other is a form of radical survival that we don't always take into account.

— Ada Limon

When some people talk about money

They speak as if it were a mysterious lover

Who went out to buy milk and never

Came back, and it makes me nostalgic

For the years I lived on coffee and bread,

Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday

Like a woman journeying for water

From a village without a well, then living

One or two nights like everyone else

On roast chicken and red wine.

— Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Poems

We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises. I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that it is true. I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people.

— Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

"God to Hungry Child"

Hungry child,

I didn't make this world for you.

You didn't buy any stock in my railroad,

You didn't invest in my corporation.

Where are your shares in standard oil?

I made the world for the rich

And the will-be-rich

And the have-always-been-rich.

Not for you,

Hungry child.

— Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

I think sometimes, when you're trying to do justice work, when you're trying to make a difference, when you're trying to change the world, the thing you need to do is get close enough to people who are falling down, get close enough to people who are suffering, close enough to people who are in pain, who've been discarded and disfavored — to get close enough to wrap your arms around them and affirm their humanity and their dignity.

— Bryan Stevenson

If only in the beginning someone said i wish us both to do more than survive

— Marcus Wicker

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

— Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

Everyone expected to die in debt, and had learned not to mind. It was just a fact of living in a country on the decline.

— Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

The wealth gap between America's richest and poorest families has doubled in the past thirty years. If the systems don't reform, they will eventually collapse under the weight of their corruption or be torn down by masses who will rightfully view them only as architects of their oppression.

— Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

This world was one of great contrasts, she thought, and if the richest part of it was to be fenced off so that people like herself could only look at it with no expectation of ever being able to get inside it, then it would be better to have been born blind so you couldn't see it, born deaf so you couldn't hear it, born with no sense of touch so you couldn't feel it. Better still, born with no brain so that you would be completely unaware of anything, so that you would never know there were places that were filled with sunlight and good food and where children were safe.

— Ann Petry, The Street

Everyone, it seems, is more desperate than they were before.

— Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

I won't lie to you. The deck marked "life" is stacked full of bum cards.

— Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

Middle-class Americans, like myself and my fellow seekers, have been raised with the old-time Protestant expectation that hard work will be rewarded with material comfort and security. This has never been true of the working class, most of which toils away at wages incommensurate with the effort required. And now, the sociologists agree, it is increasingly untrue of the educated middle class that stocks our corporate bureaucracies.

— Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

And if you've somehow managed to survive this far, now is the time to step things up and try to start caring: about a cat wailing in the yard, a baby wailing on the neighbor's balcony, a homeless guy wailing on the sidewalk across the street. I know, it's not easy. Surviving is intuitive: a bear chases you, you run. But caring? That's for advanced players. Breaking up a fight between two strangers on the street. Giving the salami sandwich you packed for lunch to a hungry-looking guy with holes in his shirt. Remembering that salami is actually thick slices of a cow that didn't ask to die. Understanding that you're part of something bigger, part of a giant, bloodied human wound. That this disease called caring is incurable and always will be.

— Etgar Keret, Autocorrect: Stories

The afflicted don't need comforting, they need what the comfortable have always had.

— Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

And so this is Um-Helat: a city whose inhabitants, simply, care for one another. That is a city's purpose, they believe — not merely to generate revenue or energy or products, but to shelter and nurture the people who do these things.

— N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

— Tagore