Sharon > Sharon's Quotes

“Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.”
― Cornel West

“You can't lead the people if you don't love the people. You can't save the people if you don't serve the people.”
― Cornel West

“I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope.”
― Cornel West

“To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely - to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.”
― Cornel West

“You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth”
― Cornell West

“You can't really move forward until you look back.

[From Remaking America panel discussion at George Washington University]”
― Cornel West

“As long as you're scared you're on the plantation.”
― Cornel West

“Be a Voice, not an Echo”
― Cornell West

“The Poverty Tour provided the opportunity to meet many people who had been living paycheck to paycheck even before the economic downturn. To so quickly slide from the great middle into the underworld of the poor validated our suspicions that perhaps these citizens never really were bona fide, middle class Americans. Indeed, some economists assert that the middle class evaporated decades ago.”
― Cornel West, The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto

“There is no Them. There are only facets of Us.”
― John Green

“And that’s when things get messy. When people begin moving beyond charity and toward justice and solidarity with the poor and oppressed, as Jesus did, they get in trouble. Once we are actually friends with the folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity. One of my friends has a shirt marked with the words of late Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara: “When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me a communist.” Charity wins awards and applause but joining the poor gets you killed. People do not get crucified for living out of love that disrupts the social order that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them.”
― Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“Last time I talked to her she didn't sound like herself. She's depressed. It's awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they're no good.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Pigs in Heaven

“Jesus is the starving, the parched, the prisoner, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the dying. Jesus is the oppressed, the poor. To live with Jesus is to live with the poor. To live with the poor is to live with Jesus.”
― Jean Vanier, Community and Growth

“The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.”
― Dorothy Day

“Some of the best people that ever lived have been as destitute as I am; and if you are a Christian, you ought not to consider poverty a crime.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness. ”
― Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty

“the holy art of “giving for Jesus’ sake” ought to be much more strongly developed among us Christians. Never forget that all state relief for the poor is a blot on the honor of your savior. The fact that the government needs a safety net to catch those who would slip between the cracks of our economic system is evidence that I have failed to do God’s work. The government cannot take the place of Christian charity. A loving embrace isn’t given with food stamps. The care of a community isn’t provided with government housing. The face of our Creator can’t be seen on a welfare voucher. What the poor need is not another government program; what they need is for Christians like me to honor our savior.”
― Abraham Kuyper, The Problem of Poverty