Quotes from my research that I like:

Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on them--will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn't rain down yesterday, today, tomorrow or ever. Good luck doesn't even fall in a fine drizzle, nomatter how hard the nobodies summon it, even in their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.

The nobodies: nobody's children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way.

Who are not, but could be.
Who don't speak languages, but dialects.
Who don't have religions, but superstitions.
Who don't create art, but handicrafts.
Who don't have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.
Eduardo Galeano, "the nobodies"

I love Galeano.. he writes what we feel, or desire to feel about life and living.. man.

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my ded be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
Wislawa Szymborska, "under one small star"

I love that last line.

As hard as concerned Americans have had to strain to understan the Zapatista revolt and its confusing and sorrowful aftermath, we will have to work harder to understand Mexican issues in the future. Our problem is not merely the media, or our notorious inability to learn another language. It is our entire evasive and mendacious culture, which (to the enourmous profit of the megacompanies that feet it) makes our selfish decadence entertaining to us, sells us headsets that deafen us to crying injustices in our own country, and changes every real, complicated, painful struggle into a brief sensation of stars, or meteors, gloriously noble or wicked, always somehow erotically intriguing today, dead boring tomorrow. If in this culture we have to hide or fight to comprehend reality right here, we have to leave all that is familiar and comfortable to comprehend reality in Mexico.
John Womack Jr. Rebellion in Chiapas

If I define my neighbor as the one I must go out to look for, on the highways and byways, in the factories and slums, on the farms and in the mines-- then my world changes. This is what is happening with the "option for the poor" for in the gospel it is the poor person who is the neighbor par excellence...
But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existences is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.
Gustavo Gutierrez, The Power of the Poor in History

All the men were used to their fetters, they all regarded them as an accomplished fact with which it was useless to argue. It is unlikely that anyone ever gave the matter an instant's thought, since during all those years it never even once occurred to the doctors to petition the authorities for the removal of the fetters from a convict who was seriously ill, especially in cases of tuberculosis... It may be objected by someone that a convict is a villain and so unworthy of blessings, but can it be right to aggravate the punishment of those whom the wrath of God has smitten in this way?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead ( a great book! I love good ol Fyodor!)