Lillian Wald, a leader in the settlement house movement and New York's pre-eminent authority on social work, despaired over "the organized bigotry, the like of which I have never seen.
One day the man in charge of the work, despairing after much searching and inquiring in vain, saw a woman coming with a basket of rubbish and filth upon her head.
What I witnessed for two nights of Youth Revival was evidence that God is working to defeat despair in Detroit and turn wounded children into winning children.
Grumpy but good-hearted, and the always-working despair of friends who want to see him married, Gruber, says his younger brother, "has been an 80-year-old Jew since he was a little kid".
In turn, the Captain, working with the despair-ridden Bon, must carry out lethal orders against innocent men, if only to appease the General and protect his own cover.
Van Gogh stayed there for 12 months, haunted by recurrent attacks, alternating between moods of calm and despair, and working intermittently: Garden of the Asylum, Cypresses, Olive Trees, Les Alpilles, portraits of doctors, and interpretations of paintings by Rembrandt, Delacroix, and Millet date from this period.
The past few decades have been ones of stagnant or declining real incomes for most Americans, followed by declining social services and a cynicism and despair among working class Americans that these conditions can be reversed.
Similar to the protests in the Middle East during Arab Spring, the street protests in Tel Aviv, and the riots in London in recent months, the India uprisings contain a cry of despair from working and professional classes that feel marginalized from public power.
The cardinal presided over a Mass dedicated to the men who serve the Roman Catholic Church, and he spoke of the sacrifices they make every day in poor neighborhoods, in ministering to the despairing, in working with little rest and sometimes with sparse resources.
When despair works its way to the surface, Erie tosses it aside: "We all gotta croak, right?" Mr. Dennehy gives just the kind of quietly dazzling performance that theatergoers have come to expect from him.
If it does not work, do not despair.
