Quotes About Struggle

My mom struggled for a long time growing up poor, and then we were on welfare when I was a kid. So to see her kids, not just me, be successful and making money and happy and healthy and in good relationships - it means so much to her after all that she's been through.

My mom was on welfare for the first five, six years of my life.

Having grown up a trailer park kid on welfare and food stamps, becoming jaded is impossible, although now I make a good living, which I'm not ashamed of; when you've been poor, it never leaves you.

I receive food stamps but I have never been on welfare.

Until I was two, my mother supplemented her welfare payments by cleaning houses and waitressing. My father didn't help.

Welfare reform isn't easy.

Every time there was a shiny car, my mum must have worried it was the welfare people coming for her kids. We had no idea.

My mother was born into a solidly middle-class family, but, as all too many Americans understand, everything doesn't always go as planned - no matter how hard you work. She died on welfare. Without the support of the state, I shudder to think of where we would have ended up.

My father worked three jobs, my mother worked two, seven days a week sometimes. And they wouldn't take welfare or social assistance, they were too proud.

When I saw the letter of acceptance for Snap - the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, popularly known as food stamps - it was a moment of gratitude, and brief catharsis and relief. Still, I knew it wasn't a socially acceptable means to feed my family with. I saw the memes friends posted, chastising people on welfare.

This resounding cry of 'welfare to work' enrages me because something like 75% or 80% of people who are on government assistance are already working.

The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits - food stamps, housing subsidies and the like - if their income goes up.

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?

Defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.

In our daily life, we encounter people who are angry, deceitful, intent only on satisfying their own needs. There is so much anger, distrust, greed, and pettiness that we are losing our capacity to work well together.

My dad's from that generation like a lot of immigrants where he feels like if you come to this country, you pay this thing like the American dream tax: like you're going to endure some racism, and if it doesn't cost you your life, well hey, you lucked out. Pay it; there you go, Uncle Sam. I was born here, so I actually had the audacity of equality.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.

There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy.

My bed isn't made, I'm tired, I haven't slept well for two weeks. I haven't been laid in a month. I don't have a girlfriend. I have a warrant for my arrest.

Well it seems to me, that all real communities grow out of a shared confrontation with survival. Communities are not produced by sentiment or mere goodwill. They grow out of a shared struggle. Our situation in the desert is an incubator for community.

Since we are not robots, we can't always perform well.

I think that humans have a huge capacity to carry pain and sadness. There are things that haunt us our entire lives; we are unable to let them go. The good times seem almost effervescent and dreamlike in comparison with the times that didn't go so well.

To some extent, 'The Wall' is asking the question, 'Do you want a voice? And if you do, you better bloody well go out and get it because it's not going to be handed to you on a plate.'

Well, I quit smoking three weeks ago and I had a hard day today not smoking.