Denise Bronson

“SJ: Ah, okay... so you're saying people just need to pull themselves up by their boostraps?
Jared: Exactly.
SJ: In order to do that, they have to be able to afford boots.”
― Nic Stone, Dear Martin

“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
― Horace Mann

“A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the bootstrap route has two choices. Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he has left behind him in the cruel upclimb. The nurse had chosen the forgetting way. Yet, as she stood there, she knew that years later she would be haunted by the sorrow in the face of that starveling child and that she would wish bitterly that she had said a comforting word then and done something towards the saving of her immortal soul. She had the knowledge that she was small but she lacked the courage to be otherwise.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.”
― George Monbiot