Top 53 Quotes About Squalor
#1. I came up with American Splendor. Some people think it's American Squalor.
Harvey Pekar
#2. Better a sovereign in squalor than a slave in splendor.
Donald James
#3. 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
#4. Entering the front door, you were at once assailed by a nightmare of cheerlessness and squalor, all the sordid melancholy, at its worst, of any nest of bedrooms where only men sleep;
Anthony Powell
#5. The concept of a troubled, lonely, middle-class, gay fifty-eight-year-old living alone in dusty squalor in a chocolate-box cottage in the heart of the Cotswolds was a hard one to grasp in the context of his sweaty, noisy, hectic, foreign, red-light existence.
Lisa Jewell
#6. To want simply what is enough nowadays suggests to people primitiveness and squalor.
Seneca The Younger
#7. The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor.
Ayn Rand
#8. Nowhere more than in New York does the contest between squalor and splendor so sharply present itself.
Fanny Fern
#9. Now there are some people, not you of course, who would say we should go to the authorities, and this is because they have no grasp at all of the realities of London for the lower classes; no grasp at all of the rookeries and the detritus of decay and squalor that is their lot. Yes?
Terry Pratchett
#10. And go to San Francisco! It's one of the twelve most interesting cities in the world. California has immense contrasts - the utmost wealth and the most hideous squalor. But there's beauty and interest everywhere.
Oliver Sacks
#11. These are precisely the conditions that killed love, after first blighting its growth: squalor, fear, uncertainty, overfamiliarity.
Patrick McGrath
#12. Was it really necessary? Was it absolutely necessary to steal that sugar bowl from Esme Squalor?
Lemony Snicket
#13. Nothing is more charming than the glow of happiness amid squalor. There is a rose-tinted attic in all our lives.
Victor Hugo
#14. The Affluent Society not only changed the way the country viewed itself, but gave new phrases to the language: Conventional wisdom, the bland leading the bland, private opulence and public squalor.
Amartya Sen
#15. 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
#16. Spices were certainly regarded as antidotes to earthly squalor in another, more mystical sense. They were thought to be splinters of paradise that had found their way into the ordinary world.
Tom Standage
#17. Soaring at this altitude, I saw Elsace as something so much cleaner. Lakes turned to puddles, cities into toys. The squalor of the slums went invisible and everything smelled fresh like rain. It was one of the reasons I loved the Wastrel. I felt so far away from all that misery down below.
Meg Merriet
#18. There was a smell about the place, which I imagined as the smell of misery and fear, though I supposed it was no more than the niff of ancient squalor and an absence of drains.
Diana Gabaldon
#19. The west has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East, from Britain's belated empire-building after the First World War to the US and British policy that condemns modern Iraq to the material and social squalor of a half-century ago.
James Buchan
#20. He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses, angry also with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity. Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision.
James Joyce
#21. Let them come. We've got helicopters, tanks, jets, and big guns. We've got armies of robots. What do they have but their stench and the squalor they live in?
Michael Monroe
#22. The whole political mess, the universal squalor, the essential pettiness of mankind oppressed him and he'd submerged himself in work and writing and books.
Laird Barron
#23. On and on and on the stories will go, and in their path will lie squalor: blood and bones and dirt and disease and misery.
Hanya Yanagihara
#24. 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
#25. Suppose we took a thousand negatives ...
combining the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city - that would be my favorite picture.
Berenice Abbott
#27. Much later I realized that Russian people, because of the poverty and squalor of their lives, love to amuse themselves with sorrow--to play with it like children, and are seldom ashamed of being unhappy.
Maxim Gorky
#28. She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity.
Nick Laird
#29. There's no question that in my lifetime, the contrast between what I called private affluence and public squalor has become very much greater.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#30. When God is your source it doesn't matter whether you're graced with a six-figure salary or living in squalor in a slum. All you got to do is see Him as your source and you'll find your needs met.
David Roiel
#31. We're not going to let people die in squalor because we are Republicans.
Donald Trump
#32. I absolutely relate to being alone in squalor, trying to come up with something adequate. I relate to that, and I've been known to crawl out of bed and drink out of a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke.
Diablo Cody
#33. South Africa is such a fraught place to live. The anxiety about crime, the crunching on racial eggshells, the juxtaposition of First World materialism with Third World squalor.
Rory Carroll
#34. Stop!" Jerome Squalor pleaded. "In the name of injustice!
Lemony Snicket
#35. 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
#36. People get frightened that success is going to take them out of life. They're no longer going to be on the corner of Bedlam and Squalor; life will only be something you can get through the mail.
Tom Waits
#37. It is just as important to bring people the evidence of the beauty of the world of nature and of man as it is to give them a document of ugliness, squalor, and despair.
Ansel Adams
#38. The total effect of Orwell's work is an effect of paradox. He was a humane man who communicated an extreme of inhuman terror; a man committed to decency who actualised a distinctive squalor.
Raymond Williams
#39. Morality is similar to religion - it is a somniferous drug which blinds people from seeing the squalor of their lives.
Irving Stone
#40. There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.
Theodore Dalrymple
#41. You know, you the worst kind, you want to marry the artist and live like squalor, but you wait, in five years you be like, Baby Jake why we eat ramen noodles every night? You a hustler, don't blind me, I see.
Stephanie Danler
#42. There seemed to be nothing that contributed more to squalor than a bunch of basalt-block structures designed to lift people out of squalor.
Philip K. Dick
#43. 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
#44. Saigon was loved precisely because it was so unlovable - its squalor, its biblical, Job-like misfortune, its imminent, hoevering doom.
Tatjana Soli
#45. I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it.
Tahir Shah
#46. 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
#47. If there was a National Tweaker Olympics, Oregon would bring home the gold in every category (Living in Squalor, Poisoning Your Neighbors, Developing Facial Scabs, Public Aggression, Theft of Useless Things, Taking Stuff Apart, and Crazy Talking).
Laurie Notaro
#48. That is the American experiment. An ethnic group arriving on America's shores, to be reviled and hazed, living in squalor, or if they are lucky Squalor Heights, working hard to give their children or grandchildren the opportunity to sh*t on the next group landing on our shores.
Jon Stewart
#49. Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I've been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers.
P. J. O'Rourke
#51. This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes. The people change, too. I'm still around, but from here on in, for reasons I'm not at liberty to disclose, I've disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.
J.D. Salinger
#52. Human beings in there took turns standing or lying down. The legs of those who stood were like fence posts driven into a warm, squirming, farting, sighing earth. The queer earth was a mosaic of sleepers who nestled like spoons.
Kurt Vonnegut
#53. She is drawn to the river, and all its hideous, dead-eyed treasures: rot-bloated cats, and cold-meat corpses of unwanted infants, eels plucking at their tender fingers and toes.
Emmanuelle De Maupassant
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