Fortunately I'm accustomed to squalor. Tell me. Who's complaining?

The filth, the squalor, the hardships in the remote areas.

I need a maid to give me a hand. I'm not used to such squalor.

They were enthusiastic about the view, but confessed their amazement at the squalor and filth in the streets.

She lived to a hundred, even then. All along it was the sadness, the squalor, but I never, until now loved her again.

I mean, there may be 100 explanations for why Haiti is the impoverished nation it is, but there is no excuse to see that sort of squalor.

As observed during earlier meetings, millions of people in Africa continue to bear the brunt of famine, extreme poverty and pandemics, and they survive each day in squalor.

We have also committed ourselves to addressing extreme poverty and hunger by redistributing land to the majority of our citizens, who had been condemned to conditions of squalor by years of colonialism and its vestiges.

The death watch for Fidel Castro is something that only Gabriel Garcia Marquez could get right. His novel Autumn of the Patriarch captures perfectly the moral squalor, political paralysis, and savage ennui that enshrouds a society awaiting the death of a long term dictator.

Of course, Russia s rulers have usually preferred myth to reality. After all, it was during the reign of Catherine the Great that the Potemkin village was invented, whereby the squalor of the lives of Catherine s serfs was hidden behind cheerfully painted housing façades as the Empress toured her country.

Second, depending on the institution s mandate, a state led investment program offers a way to rebalance the British economy away from private speculative activity to long term investment in sustainable growth, and away from the south east to the midlands and the north of England. In short, it offers a way to address the problem of private affluence and public squalor that John Kenneth Galbraith identified in the 1950s.

The great dissident writer Nadezhda Mandelstam had seen for us a future in which we could only hope against hope yet here was a leader who saw for us a future not of squalor and moral compromise, but of freedom and opportunity. I still shake my head in wonder that she could embrace the abandoned hope of liberation when almost no one else not even Gorbachev could even imagine it.

We do not say that we necessarily accept the status quo. But we have learned to live with it. Neither do we accept that squalor, injustice and poverty should be the norms guiding relations between human beings in the next millennium. So, in recognizing our own shortcomings and failures, we also recognize that humankind is presented with a unique opportunity to right the wrongs and injustices that it has perpetrated.