“We have, in our Slum Cities, manufactured a Poverty which, instead of bracing and disciplining our manhood into higher service, tends only to maim and stunt and discredit and degrade it.”

2009, Speech: The Socio-Economic Peace Program of Senator Francis Escudero

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

Know Thyself (1881)
Context: What "Conservatives," "Liberals" and "Conservative-liberals," and finally "Democrats," "Socialists," or even "Social-democrats" etc., have lately uttered on the Jewish Question, must seem to us a trifle foolish; for none of these parties would think of testing that "Know thyself" upon themselves, not even the most indefinite and therefore the only one that styles itself in German, the "Progress"-party. There we see nothing but a clash of interests, whose object is common to all the disputants, common and ignoble: plainly the side most strongly organised, i. e. the most unscrupulous, will bear away the prize. With all our comprehensive State- and National-Economy, it would seem that we are victims to a dream now flattering, now terrifying, and finally asphyxiating: all are panting to awake therefrom; but it is the dream's peculiarity that, so long as it enmeshes us, we take it for real life, and fight against our wakening as though we fought with death. At last one crowning horror gives the tortured wretch the needful strength: he wakes, and what he held most real was but a figment of the dæmon of distraught mankind.
We who belong to none of all those parties, but seek our welfare solely in man's wakening to his simple hallowed dignity; we who are excluded from these parties as useless persons, and yet are sympathetically troubled for them, — we can only stand and watch the spasms of the dreamer, since no cry of ours can pierce to him. So let us save and tend and brace our best of forces, to bear a noble cordial to the sleeper when he wakes, as of himself he must at last.

Letter to Dr. Theodore Canisius (17 May 1859)
1850s

The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Clea (1960)

"Rocky Ground"
Song lyrics, Wrecking Ball (2012)

(1986) n.p.
Structures are no longer valid', in "Ein Gespräch..."

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 1
Context: I am trying to describe the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all part of the story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some idea of what life was like there.

As quoted in The Two Faces of Islam, by Stephen Schwartz