A Quote by Elbert Hubbard

A person born with an instinct for poverty. — © Elbert Hubbard
A person born with an instinct for poverty.
I'm not quite sure precisely when social and political activism became a visible brand of my DNA, but it seems to me that I was born into it. It is hard to be born into the experience in the world of poverty and not develop some instinct for survival and resistance to those things that oppress you.
Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.
Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.
Everything's borne out of human experience, of course - rejection, humiliation, poverty, whatever. People aren't born bad, no matter how harsh the circumstances. There is a person in there, and that person is not made of ice.
If you are born into poverty, the chances are good that your children will be born into poverty. Find a way to give poor kids the same cognitive stimulus that rich kids receive, and they should end up with the same tools for success.
Many communities are already devastated by poverty. Increasingly, that poverty is born of the greed of a global trading system.
Being born into poverty does not mean you are condemned to spend the rest of your life in poverty.
You can be born into privilege, or you can not be born into privilege. You can be born into the opposite extreme and into poverty. I think from there on, though, you really do have to make your luck.
It's just cheaper to be White in America than it is to be Black, because of educational advances, because of the police incidents, because of the poverty we grow up in as African-Americans. So, it's just cheaper in this country if you're born a Caucasian than being born a Black person.
I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.
Think about it: Every educated person is not rich, but almost every education person has a job and a way out of poverty. So education is a fundamental solution to poverty.
Anyone has outside influences. They are the results of the cosmic roll of the dice: this person is born Aragon the Ranger, this person is born a prisoner in North Korea, this person is born Carlos the Dwarf. Some of these things are out of our control, but that doesn't mean that they can't be changed. A character, just like a person in real life, is a summation of her actions and feelings. Our actions and emotions are not performed against nothing, they do not arise from dust, we are in constant friction, and/or flow with our surroundings.
When I pick up a person from the street, hungry, I give him a plate of rice, a piece of bread. But a person who is shut out, who feels unwanted, unloved, terrified, the person who has been thrown out of society - that spiritual poverty is much harder to overcome. And abortion, which often follows from contraception, brings a people to be spiritually poor, and that is the worst poverty and the most difficult to overcome.
The people of western Missouri are, in some respects, very peculiar. We will take Jackson county where I was born for instance. In that section the people seemed to be born fighters, the instinct being inherited from a long line of ancestors.
I am convinced that all this poverty in Mexico and in Latin America, like it's happening in China is the opportunity to grow. It's an opportunity for investment; it's an economic activity and to take out poverty is the best investment any person or a person can do in any place.
Like David Copperfield, I was born amidst poverty and grew up in poverty. I did not own shoes. I did not bathe in water from a tap. I did no know about forks and spoons.
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