Quotes About Poverty

Poverty is a strange and elusive thing. ... I condemn poverty and I advocate it; poverty is simple and complex at once; it is a social phenomenon and a personal matter. Poverty is an elusive thing, and a paradoxical one. We need always to be thinking and writing about it, for if we are not among its victims its reality fades from us. We must talk about poverty because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.

We're looking at the singular condition of poverty. All the other individual problems spring from that condition... doesn't matter if it's death, aid, trade, AIDS, famine, instability, governance, corruption or war. All of that is poverty. Our problem is that everybody tries to heal each of the individual aspects of poverty, not poverty itself.

Let us look at wealth and poverty. The affluent society and the deprived society inter-are. The wealth of one society is made of the poverty of the other. "This is like this, because that is like that." Wealth is made of non-wealth elements, and poverty is made by non-poverty elements. [...] so we must be careful not to imprison ourselves in concepts. The truth is that everything contains everything else. We cannot just be, we can only inter-be. We are responsible fo everything that happens around us.

I'm very familiar with poverty. I find it easy to be with, whether I'm in America or in Africa or in Asia. Wherever I go and find the environment of those who are living in poverty and resisting poverty is a great in which I have great comfort.

There is little favorable to be said about poverty, but it was often an incubator of true friendship. Many people will appear to befriend you when you are wealthy, but precious few will do the same when you are poor. If wealth is a magnet, poverty is a kind of repellent. Yet, poverty often brings out the true generosity in others.

I believe the war on poverty is a more American idea than the war on the war on poverty. I believe that most people feel like that. And I believe that it ain't over till it's over.

One would have thought that it was even more necessary to limit population than property; and that the limit should be fixed by calculating the chances of mortality in the children, and of sterility in married persons. The neglect of this subject, which in existing states is so common, is a never-failing cause of poverty among the citizens; and poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.

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.

Poverty is only contemptible when it is felt to be so. Doubtless the best way to make our poverty respectable is to seem never to feel it as an evil.

He [Hugo Chavez] put poverty at the heart of political debate. Rightly so, given the country's immense inequality and poverty. He invested heavily in social programs such as literacy, health clinics, and education. He promoted Venezuela's indigenous culture and urged compatriots to take pride in its pre-Columbian history. He called time on the US treating Latin America as its backyard.

If you fall into poverty, live that way without grumbling - then your poverty will not burden you. Likewise, if you are rich, live with your riches. All this is the functioning of Buddha-nature. In short, Buddha-nature has the quality of infinite adaptability.

The deepest poverty is the inability of joy, the tediousness of a life considered absurd and contradictory. This poverty is widespread today, in very different forms in the materially rich as well as the poor countries. The inability of joy presupposes and produces the inability to love, produces jealousy, avarice - all defects that devastate the life of individuals and of the world. This is why we are in need of a new evangelization - if the art of living remains an unknown, nothing else works... this art can only be communicated by [one] who has life - he who is the Gospel personified.

We love to think this fundamentalism and terrorism is all about poverty, and, of course, it has a connection. You can see that these people not only are poor but they have no outlets. These governments allow no opposition. So what do people do? They go to Islam. It's the only organizational institution where they can express their feelings. But it's not about poverty. I've never seen a single demonstration in which the people have come out with signs saying, "Please give us better roads. Please give us new prenatal clinics. Please give us a new sewage system."

During my eleven years as a New York City public school teacher, I saw firsthand the impact that poverty has on the classroom. In low-income neighborhoods like Sunset Park, where I taught, students as young as five years old enter school affected by the stresses often created by poverty: domestic violence, drug abuse, gang activity.

...If peace were the goal of today's intellectuals, a failure of that magnitude -- and the evidence of unspeakable suffering on so large a scale -- would make them pause and check their statist premises. Instead, blind to everything but their hatred for capitalism, they are now asserting that 'poverty breeds wars' ... But the question is: What breeds poverty? If you look a the world of today and if you look back at history, you will see the answer: the degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity.

No one ever got rich by studying poverty and thinking about poverty.

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.

it is impossible to attack the problem of poverty in the industrialized or the developing world effectively unless the extent to which poverty is a women's problem is recognized.

Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.

The form of law which I propose would be as follows: In a state which is desirous of being saved from the greatest of all plagues-not faction, but rather distraction-there should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor, again, excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil . . . Now the legislator should determine what is to be the limit of poverty or of wealth.

I know that in the rap game you've got a lot of people, that come from poverty, was born in poverty and if it wasn't for hiphop they'd still be living in that. So when I think of hiphop, I think hiphop saves lifes, hiphop changes lives.

It has always been my view that terrorism is not spawned by the poverty of money; it is spawned by the poverty of dignity. Humiliation is the most underestimated force in international relations and in human relations. It is when people or nations are humiliated that they really lash out and engage in extreme violence.

Malthus argued a century and a half ago that man, by using up all his available resources, would forever press on the limits of subsistence, thus condemning humanity to an indefinite future of misery and poverty. We can now begin to hope and, I believe, know that Malthus was expressing not a law of nature, but merely the limitation then of scientific and social wisdom. The truth or falsity of his prediction will depend now, with the tools we have, on our own actions, now and in the years to come.

Terrorism is usually fueled by poverty, and the fanatical faith of the terrorists who truly believe that the more people they kill who do not subscribe to their faith, the greater their reward in heaven.

Poverty and wealth inequality are a form of instability into the future.

Poverty is a stubborn thing: you seldom escape it with one bound.

Life, struggle, even amidst pain and blood and poverty, seemed beautiful.

This growing poverty in the midst of growing population constitutes a permanent menace to peace. And not only to peace, but also to democratic institutions and personal liberty For overpopulation is not compatible with freedom.

Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.

It's not logical that we boast the most advanced and powerful internationally integrated economy in the world, then claim organizational incompetence and poverty when it comes to creating and funding a national health care system for all Americans.

God makes all chosen souls pass through a fearful time of poverty, misery, and nothingness. He desires to destroy in them gradually all the help and confidence they derive from themselves so that He may be their sole source of support, their confidence, their hope, their only resource.

The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can't solve extreme poverty and disease, isn't just mistaken. It is harmful.

Poverty is the fundamental cause of most of the physical, moral and economic ills of humanity.

The things I really cared about - poverty, the Great Society, civil rights - were all being drained away by the Vietnam War. The line that keeps running through my mind is the line I never spoke: "I can't speak for a war that I believe is immoral."

In early childhood you may lay the foundation of poverty or riches, industry or idleness, good or evil, by the habits to which you train your children. Teach them right habits then, and their future life is safe.

We must be like the fountain or spring that is continually emptying itself of all that it has and is continually being refilled from an invisible source. To be continually giving out for the good of our fellows undeterred by fear of poverty and reliant on the unfailing bounty of the Source of all wealth and all good -- this is the secret of right living.

Whether our task is fighting poverty, stemming the spread of disease or saving innocent lives from mass murder, we have seen that we cannot succeed without the leadership of the strong and the engagement of all.

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.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

We are here among you as seekers of refuge from our present-your future-a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty-the end of the capitalistic experiment. Once we came to understand the simpl...truth that earth's resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the whole capitalistic illusion fell to pieces. Those of us who spoke this truth were denounced as heretics, as enemies of the prevailing economic faith. Like religious Dissenters of an earlier day.

Only that which lasts forever is real. That which is done in the temple lasts forever; therefore, the temple is the real world. Most of what we experience "out there," such as sickness, wealth, poverty, fame, etc., lasts for only a short period of time, so it is not the real world.

If the people of God were to transform the world through fascination, these amazing teachings had to work at the center of these peculiar people. Then we can look into the eyes of a centurion and see not a beast but a child of God, and then walk with that child a couple of miles. Look into the eys of tax collectors as they sue you in court; see their poverty and give them your coat. Look in to the eys of the ones who are hardest for you to like, and see the One you love. For God loves good and bad people.

Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking.

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.

Perseverance gives power to weakness, and opens to poverty the world's wealth. It spreads fertility over the barren landscape, and buds the choicest flowers and fruits spring up and flourish in the desert abode of thorns and briars.

There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.

He who accepts his poverty unhurt I'd say is rich although he lacked a shirt. But truly poor are they who whine and fret and covet what they cannot hope to get.

It will be nearly impossible to slow warming appreciably without condemning much of the world to poverty unless energy sources that emit little or no carbon dioxide become competitive with conventional fossil fuels.