Les Misérables Poverty Quotes

Are we cheating a little here? We might be cheating. "The Noxious Poor isn't a quotation so much as it is a chapter title, but we think it deserves its own thought. By using the adjective "noxious," Hugo encapsulates the general attitude toward the poor: they're gross, inconvenient, and probably smelly. Does that sound like something you'd say about another person? No. It does not. It sounds like something you say about household pests. In other words, the way we talk about poverty and the poor matters. If we use the language of animals, we're going to treat the poor like animals. But if we think of them as real people, with hopes and desires and dreams of their own, then maybe we can actually start to help.

For Hugo, money doesn't make the world go 'round—kindness and generosity do. Okay, that sounds like a great ideal. But what happens when you're so poor that you can't even feed yourself? You start looking out for good ol' Numero Uno, which is a major sin in Hugo's book of morality.

Gavroche meets a pair of homeless children in the streets of Paris and finds out they have no place to sleep. Look, we're all for free-range parenting or whatever it's called when you don't call the cops on some kid's parents for letting him play by himself in his own front yard. But these kids are between five and ten years old, and they're wandering around Paris at night, in the cold, without anything to eat or anywhere to sleep. That sounds like a good reason to have a social safety net.