"The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied . . . but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.
John Berger, British author, critic. The Soul and the Operator, in Expressen (Stockholm; 19 March 1990, reprinted in Keeping a Rendezvous, 1992).