Henry Scott Holland

"Poverty ... allows them no room to breathe, to grow, to expand. It gives no time for spiritual interests. It chokes back the religious instincts. It offers no opportunities for the play of the higher …"

"Do we suppose Jesus Christ laid His blessing on this unholy poverty? Do we really imagine that this is what He had in His eye, as He pronounced the benediction? Nay! This is the Poverty which blights …"

"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."

"Here are poor who, far from discovering their true selves through the pressure of their poverty, find in it a cloud which for ever hides them from themselves."