As a kid, I got three meals a day. Oatmeal, miss-a-meal and no meal.

I’ll tell you what I was like as a child. I was a good person. I was high-spirited but I was a big reader.

If you’re a person struggling to eat and stay healthy, you might have heard about Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali, but you’ll never have heard of Bill Gates.

Nutrition is so important. It can’t be stressed enough.

I would love to encourage all my teammates to eat the best way they possibly can. High school athletes. Now, that’s not the way our food system in America is set up. It’s very different. They have a food pyramid, and I disagree with that. I disagree with a lot of things that people tell you to do.

He who has made a fair compact with poverty is rich.

When I was a child, I was very poor and wanted everything. So when I got money, I began buying things.

My parents were divorced by the time I was even conscious – like, I don’t remember them ever being together.

Giving a poor person money keeps them poor.

This healthy eating stuff, it’s here to stay, and we now have everything we need to seize the opportunity and give all our kids the healthy futures they so richly deserve.

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

Poverty wants some, luxury many, and avarice all things.

You send a boy to school in order to make friends – the right sort.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

I praticed making faces in the mirror and it would drive my mother crazy. She used to scare me by saying that I was going to see the devil if I kept looking in the mirror. That fascinated me even more, of course.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

There is no doubt that some plant food, such as oatmeal, is more economical than meat, and superior to it in regard to both mechanical and mental performance. Such food, moreover, taxes our digestive organs decidedly less, and, in making us more contented and sociable, produces an amount of good difficult to estimate.

You cannot spend money in luxury without doing good to the poor. Nay, you do more good to them by spending it in luxury, than by giving it; for by spending it in luxury, you make them exert industry, whereas by giving it, you keep them idle.

I grew up in the east side of Detroit in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. I never woke up saying, ‚I’m an orphan again today, isn’t this terrible? Poor me.‘

In ‚Changeling,‘ I tried to show something you’d never see nowadays – a kid sitting and looking at the radio. Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind does the rest.

Yes, we’ve still got more work to do. More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who has not yet felt the progress of these past seven and a half years.

My first recollection is that of a bugle call.

Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.

What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility – America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts.

When I was five, I think, that’s when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

When we see the face of a child, we think of the future. We think of their dreams about what they might become, and what they might accomplish.

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don’t think anyone in my family would really feel I’d done them an injustice by saying that. We didn’t see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

I grew up reading science fiction.

No one ever told me I should eat egg whites or drink a gallon of water each day.

I have never felt more confident in myself, more clear on who I am as a woman. But I am constantly thinking about my own health and making sure that I’m eating right and getting exercise and watching the aches and pains. I want to be this really fly 80-90-year old.

From childhood on, I did sit in the courtroom watching my father argue cases and talk to juries.

You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.

Poverty breeds despair. We know this. Despair breeds violence. We know this. In turbulent times, isn’t it cheaper, and smarter, to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later?

The poorest people are the sweetest people.

I am very strict about what I eat. I do not consume anything that my body does not require. It takes a lot of sacrifice and discipline. It wasn’t easy before but now its second nature for me.

The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves.

Clearly this is a tough economic time, and a lot of families are hurting. So when we talk to parents, we talk about small changes for kids and things that don’t cost extra money. Like adding water and eliminating sugary drinks and sodas. That’s going to save money right there. Or adding a few more vegetables.

The biggest and most deadly ‚tax‘ rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits – food stamps, housing subsidies and the like – if their income goes up.

From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the ‚Pilgrim’s Progress,‘ my first collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes.

We believe that every single child has boundless promise, no matter who they are, where they come from, or how much money their parents have. We’ve got to remember that. We believe that each of these young people is a vital part of the great American story.

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.

Oh, how I would like a poor Church, and for the poor.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

The innocence of childhood is like the innocence of a lot of animals.

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.

A child thinks 20 shillings and 20 years can scarce ever be spent.

When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.

An army marches on its stomach.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

Hunger is the best pickle.

If you’re totally illiterate and living on one dollar a day, the benefits of globalization never come to you.

Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.

Some folks believe that hardship breeds artistic creativity. I don’t buy it. One can put up with poverty for a while when one is young, but it will inevitably wear a person down.

I grew up in an era of pretty severe poverty. My parents weathered the Great Depression, and money was always a very big concern. I was weaned on a shortage mentality and placed in foster homes largely because there simply wasn’t enough money to take care of the most basic of needs.

Part of my daily regime is my glucosamine and, of course, a multitude of multivitamins. Branched-chain amino acids, glutamine, of course protein. I have one protein shake a day, and that is immediately after my training.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.

A bachelor’s life is a fine breakfast, a flat lunch, and a miserable dinner.

I can’t say this enough – the food that you put into your bodies can actually help you get better grades. And it can also affect your performance in sports and other activities too. You see, when you give your body the best possible fuel, you have more energy, you’re stronger, you think more quickly.

What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance.