Quotes About Poverty

The only way to end poverty, to make it history, is to build viable systems on the ground that deliver critical and affordable goods and services to the poor, in ways that are financially sustainable and scaleable. If we do that, we really can make poverty history.

My vision for the future? Two things: to make credit a human right so that each individual human being will have the opportunity to take loans and implement his or her ideas so that self-exploration becomes possible. And second: that it will lead to a world where nobody has to suffer from poverty - a world completely free from poverty.

Wealth and poverty are seen for what they are. It begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel poor, and poverty consists in feeling poor. The rich, as we reckon them, and among them the very rich, in a true scale would be found very indigent and ragged.

The ultimate objective of subsidies should be to empower the poor, to break the cycle of poverty, and become foot-soldiers in our war on poverty.

We create institutions and policies on the basis of the way we make assumptions about us and others. We accept the fact that we will always have poor people around us. So we have had poor people around us. If we had believed that poverty is unacceptable to us, and that it should not belong to a civilized society, we would have created appropriate institutions and policies to create a poverty-free world.

Poverty with joy isn't poverty at all. The poor man is not one who has little, but one who hankers after more.

By the Reagan era, the 'culture of poverty' had become a cornerstone of conservative ideology: poverty was caused not by low wages or a lack of jobs but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles. The poor were dissolute, promiscuous, prone to addiction and crime, unable to 'defer gratification' or possibly even set an alarm clock. The last thing they could be trusted with was money.

The opposite of poverty is not wealth. I don't believe that. I actually think, in too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.

Polak, a psychiatrist, has applied a behavioral and anthropological approach to alleviating poverty, developed by studying people in their natural surroundings. He argues that there are three mythic solutions to poverty eradication: donations, national economic growth, and big businesses. Instead, he advocates helping the poor earn money through their own efforts of developing low-cost tools that are effective and profitable.

.......the poor of the world cannot be made rich by redistribution of wealth. Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty, taking their money and giving it as a reward to people who have failed to escape. Economic leveling doesn't work. Whether we call it Marxism, Progressive Reform, or Clintonomics, the result is the same slide into the stygian pit. Communists worship Satan; socialists think perdition is a good system run by bad men; and liberals want us to go to hell because it's warm there in the winter.

I grew up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood, but I didn't really know I was a deprived, poverty-stricken child until the media made me aware of it.

Can we not wage a war and emerge victorious against poverty. Let us defeat poverty.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

No longer can we measure compassion by how much we spend on poverty but how many people we help to lift out of poverty.

You can't lift people out of poverty simply by tweaking the tax system, or by raising the minimum wage by a few cents, or by reducing student debt slightly. These might be necessary components of a larger anti-poverty program, but you have to accept they are pieces of a much larger puzzle.

What's most striking is that the world as a whole has made remarkable progress against hunger, poverty and disease. I believe in God, and I see that hundreds of millions of people have escaped from poverty in places like Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Brazil and Britain. That's why, for me, it makes sense that this is God moving in our history.

The World Bank is the monopoly provider of poverty data and, partly due to a leadership change there, the World Bank's reporting has been heavily on the rosy side since about 2000. The Bank's cultivation of an upbeat picture affords a very interesting lesson in statistics and how you can, depending on which numbers you present and how you present them, create a more positive or more negative impression of the evolution of poverty.

When we talk about gender pay gaps in the United States, and if you look at women without children, they earn 96 cents for every dollar that a man is earning, while for mothers it is about 76 cents. That's nearly 25 percent less. For single mothers, the situation is even worse. One third of them are living in poverty or just on the edge of poverty. This is an unacceptable situation.

Few things in this world more trouble people than poverty, or the fear of poverty; and, indeed, it is a sore affliction; but, like all other ills that flesh is heir to, it has its antidote, its reliable remedy. The judicious application of industry, prudence and temperance is a certain cure.

Contrary to age-old prejudices, the wealth of the rich is not the cause of the poverty of the poor, but helps to alleviate that poverty.

Capitalists control the machineries. They create difficulties to the workers. Consequently rationalism, which has to lead the way for peaceful life to all, has resulted in causing poverty and worries to the people because of dominating forces.

The true friend of the people should see that they be not too poor, for extreme poverty lowers the character of the democracy.

Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development... For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right.... Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential.

Both poverty and wealth are excellent things, because they are extremes, but the middle ground is damaging to the soul.

The heart of the matter, as I see it, is the stark fact that world poverty is primarily a problem of two million villages, and thus a problem of two thousand million villagers.

The Roosevelt enactment of Social Security was a moral revolution in our country: We were assured that we would never reach the very depths of poverty. And to be told, that we are now going to gamble it, on Wall Street, is nonsense!

Anecdote: The East End seemed to be in the grip of yet another economic crisis. ... By the winter of 1933, an army of the unemployed gathered daily outside the dock gates, desperate for a day or 2 paid work. .... There was no cushion, no disaster fund, no stashed savings, no government handouts no syrup that could sweeten the bitter pill of poverty.

I've always believed the two best anti-poverty programs are work and marriage.

...Cities may be rebuilt, and a People reduced to Poverty, may acquire fresh Property: But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever. When the People once surrendered their share in the Legislature, and their Right of defending the Limitations upon the Government, and of resisting every Encroachment upon them, they can never regain it.

Poverty is not simply having no money - it is isolation, vulnerability, humiliation and mistrust.

Through poverty, godhunger, the family debacle, I kept a sense of worth. I could limn and paint like no-one else in this human-wounded land: I was worth the while of living. Now my skill is dead. I should be.

I visited the Ethiopian National Project which was created by the government to fully integrate Ethiopian Jews into Israel's society. They're still facing a lot of challenges with poverty, unemployment but the Ethiopian National Project is really doing an extraordinary job in empowering the Ethiopian community to be successful.

There are a lot of stats and a strong correlation between dropout rates and crime as well as poverty.

In spite of our poverty and our economic dependence, we do not have to give in, neither because we are sometimes abandoned nor because of the wish of some nations to impose their economic or political models.

America must remain freedom's staunchest friend, for freedom is our best ally and it is the world's only hope to conquer poverty and preserve peace.

No solution [to the problem of poverty] is so effective as providing income to the poor. Whether in the form of food, housing, health services, education or money, income is an excellent antidote for deprivation. No truth has spawned so much ingenious evasion.

Through a policy driven approach we have wage a war against poverty and we are confident we will win this war.

So she doesn't call desertion, poverty, and hard work troubles? She's a brave little girl, and I shall be proud to know her.

The country is in the worst conditions ever in its history. It's unjustifiable that in a country with the largest petroleum reserves on the planet, 70% of the food we eat is imported ... that there are 700,000 families in extreme poverty who go to bed hungry every night.

A quality education grants us the ability to fight the war on ignorance and poverty.

By 1990, no Australian child will be living in poverty.

Poverty often hides her charms under an ugly mask; yet thousands have been forced into greatness by their very struggle to keep the wolf from the door.

That is one of the bitter curses of poverty; it leaves no right to be generous.

The essential in this time of moral poverty is to create enthusiasm.

I think a lot about the poems I wasn't able to write...I masturbrated...Solitude is essentially a matter of pride; you bury yourself in your own scent. The issue is the same for all real poets. If you've been happy for too long, you become banal. By the same token, if you've been unhappy for a long time, you lose your poetic power...Happiness and poverty can only coexist for the briefest time. Afterword either happiness coarsens the poet or the poem is so true it destroys his happiness.

This administration here and now declares unconditional war on poverty.

Abolish plutocracy if you would abolish poverty.

Only the poor can know all the disadvantages of poverty. Only the rich can know all the disadvantages of wealth.