In a book review, a powerful quote from Agee and Walker Evans’s landmark 1941 book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; "near the outset of the manuscript, Agee offers this overture to his own closely observed study of lives laid low by a system of brutal privation:" - http://www.thenation.com/article...
"A civilization which for any reason puts a human life at a disadvantage; or a civilization which can exist only by putting human life at a disadvantage; is worthy neither of the name nor of continuance. And a human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea." - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)