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"You cannot get into heaven without a recommendation letter from the poor." (James Forbes, NYC)
"The Salvation Army is a spoecialized vehicle for delivering the gospel; a compact, colourful, hard-hitting, open-air expert that makes the sky is Sistine Chapel and the walls of taverns, banks, brothels and 10-cent stores Westminster Abbey." (Ted Palmer)
"Saving the poor is a euphemism for destroying the poor unless they are helped to reach out to others." (Christine MacMillan)
"To me men, especially the worst, possess the attraction of gold mines." (William Booth)
"We are moral scavengers netting the very sewers. We want all we can get, but we want the lowest of the low." (William Booth)
"The richer, the wiser, the more powerful a man is, the greater is the obligation upon him to employ his gifts in the lessening of the sum of human misery." (John Randolph)
"Whoever is spared personal pain, must feel himself called to help in the diminishing of the pain of others." (Albert Schweitzer)
"The most important thing we can do socially is to rediscover our neighbour." (Jacques Ellul)
"...our view of the world is largely shaped by what we see around us every day - by what we can touch, feel, taste, see and smell. We all like to believe that our opinions on most matters, especially social and political questions, are formed by our ideas and principles, the things we have learned, and the concepts we have studied. But in reality, our perspective is primarily shaped by our experience - what we see when we get out of bed in the morning. We search for a moral perspective that might open our eyes, soften our hearts, and change our ways. That may require that we sometimes change our location." (Jim Wallis)
"While women weep as they do now, I'll fight; while little children go hungry as they do now, I'll fight; while men go to prison, in and out, in and out, as they do now, I'll fight; while there is a drunkard left, while there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, while there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I'll fight - I'll fight to the very end!" (William Booth)
"Do you know what I think Jesus Christ would do if He came now? He would go to church and chapel ever so many times and listen, and no one would speak to him. He would look to see who sat around Him and he would see no ragged people, no thieves, no harlots, only respectable people singing hymns to Christ, and giving all the glory to Christ, and then after standing it a long time, Jesus would stand up some day in the midde of Church and say just two words, 'Damn Christ!' and then he would go out and go down some slum and put His arms around the neck of some poor lost orphan girl, who was having a bitter cry, and say, 'Come unto Me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest'... The hardest cross Christ has to bear is the cross that is made of those who call themselves His own church. Never tell anyone to be a Christian. Always tell them to 'be Christ'". ( W.T. Stead)
"God shall have all there is of me. There have been men with greater brains than I, even with greater opportunities, but from that day when I got the poor of London on my heart and caught a vision of what Jesus Christ could do to change them and me, on that day, I made up my mind that God should have all of William Booth that there was." (William Booth)
"To help the poor, to minister to them in their slums, to sympathize with them in their poverty, afflictions, and irreligion, was the natural outcome that came to my soul through believing in Jesus Christ." (William Booth)
"In Jesus, God emptied himself in kenosis. God did not become generically human, but specifically poor, 'taking the form of a slave.' (Philippians 2:7). He 'lived among us' (John 1:14), among the poor. He did not come into the world in general - which would itself have been an 'emptying' - but into the world of outcasts. He chose that social level: on the margins, among the oppressed, with the poor. The kenosis of the 'in-carnation' did not consist simply in taking on 'flesh'… but also in taking on 'poverty', the poverty of humankind. The church, as a whole, if it wished to be increasingly evangelical and more effectively evangelizing, will have to go through this exodus and into this emptying process. It will have to insert itself - with its human and material resources and all its institutional weight - into the social situation of the poor majorities, among the greatest needs of the poor, on the periphery of this human world divided into rich and poor. The mystical body of Christ has to be where the historical body of Christ was." (Pedro Casaldaliga and Jose-Maria Vigil)
