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.

In today's world, people experience two types of poverty: the poverty caused by lack of food, clothing and shelter, and the poverty caused by lack of love and compassion. Of these two, the second type needs to be considered first because if we have love and compassion in our hearts, then we will wholeheartedly serve those who suffer from lack of food, clothing and shelter.

Possession of material riches, without inner peace, is like dying of thirst while bathing in a lake. If material poverty is to be avoided, spiritual poverty is to be abhorred. For it is spiritual poverty, not material lack, that lies at the core of all human suffering.

Men pray to the Almighty to relieve poverty. But poverty comes not from God's laws-it is blasphemy of the worst kind to say that. Poverty comes from man's injustice to his fellow man.

There is another form of poverty! It is the spiritual poverty of our time, which afflicts the so-called richer countries particularly seriously.

Today is International Women's Day, and there's a fantastic set of pieces running by an organization called ONE called "Poverty Is Sexist." It's a great way to quickly learn about what's actually going on for women in poverty around the world, and then do something about it.

We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won

It isn't poverty that breeds terrorism, but terrorism that breeds poverty.

We tend to put the environment last because we think the first thing we have to do is eliminate poverty. But you can't reduce poverty in a vacuum. You are doing it in an environment.

Our poverty is freedom. This is our poverty - the giving up our freedom to dispose of things, to choose, to possess

For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

Poverty is not for the sake of hardship. No, it is there because nothing exists but Allah. Poverty unlocks the door - what a blessed key!

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

People would rather live in an area of poverty than in an area where there are no jobs, because if they live in poverty, they have a certain sense of hope they can get out of it. If there are no jobs, there's no hope. And bad things come from that.

For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

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.

Think about it: Every educated person is not rich, but almost every education person has a job and a way out of poverty. So education is a fundamental solution to poverty.

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."

I can't help but react to the painful realities of the two-tiered society we live in, where the signs of poverty and inequity are everywhere. Almost twenty five percent of our children live at or below the poverty line. We expect the no-option life cycle of the poor to be interrupted by the weak social safety net and then wonder why building more jails doesn't solve the problems.

This nation has always struggled with how it was going to deal with poor people and people of color. Every few years you will see some great change in the way that they approach this. We've had the war on poverty that never really got into waging a real war on poverty

We believe that poverty does not belong in a civilized human society. It belongs in museums [...] A poverty-free world might not be perfect, but it would be the best approximation of the ideal.

Poverty without a people's government looks like hopelessness, but to see poverty in organized communities is to see relief-in-progress.

Chile has done a lot to rid itself of poverty, especially extreme poverty, since the return to democracy. But we still have a ways to go toward greater equity. This country does not have a neoliberal economic model anymore. We have put in place a lot of policies that will ensure that economic growth goes hand in hand with social justice.

In the developed countries there is a poverty of intimacy, a poverty of spirit, of loneliness, of lack of love. There is no greater sickness in the world today than that one.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. . . . In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.

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.

How the American right managed to convince itself that the programs to alleviate poverty are responsible for the consequences of poverty will someday be studied as a notorious mass illusion.

What power can poverty have over a home where loving hearts are beating with a consciousness of untold riches of the head and heart?

He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard [...]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.

Even in Europe a change has sensibly taken place in the mind of man. Science has liberated the ideas of those who read and reflect, and the American example has kindled feelings of right in the people. An insurrection has consequently begun of science talents and courage against rank and birth, which have fallen into contempt. It has failed in its first effort, because the mobs of the cities, the instrument used for its accomplishment, debased by ignorance, poverty and vice, could not be restrained to rational action. But the world will soon recover from the panic of this first catastrophe.

The problem the world faces today is that only one-third of the world's population lives in decent circumstances, while half the population of the world lives on one or two dollars a day. And even as we have this poverty and backwardness, we are facing a global environmental crisis. We need developmental models that will take into account the specific and unique position of each country and at the same time will address the environmental crisis.

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

We all have families who are longing for peace in the world and an end to the suffering caused by poverty, disease, and hunger. Untold numbers of our friends, our neighbors, our parents, and our children, are hoping that there is more understanding, more generosity, more genuine friendship, and more caring among people of all faiths and cultures.

Barack Obama's been president for about eight hours; President Obama was here for eight years. So if you want to talk about numbers that matter, it's quantifying all the losses - the women who were slid into poverty, those who can't find meaningful work, and their children who deserve a better life.

The importance of detachment from things, the importance of poverty, is that we are supposed to be free from things that we might prefer to people. Wherever things have become more important than people, we are in trouble. That is the crux of the whole matter.

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion about the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.

Average wages now are still just barely above poverty, and one out of three Americans cannot afford healthcare even with the insurance,with jobs.

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

Managing your money does not depend upon becoming wealthy or declaring vows of poverty. Rather, it is about creating stability and sufficiency - a balanced flow of monetary energy through your life.

The collective shortfall of the 3.08 billion people (47 percent of world population) who, in 2005, lived below $2.50 per day was $507 billion per annum, which indeed comes to about two-thirds of the present US military budget. This gives us a rough sense of how much the eradication of poverty would cost.

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

There are things to be afraid of - like extraordinary poverty and suffering beyond anything I've experienced, and climate change, despots - but there's really nothing to be afraid of when your job is an actor and you're at work, if you're in a place that is safe and full of respect and love, which we are.

The new millennium began with a great global dream. World leaders gathered at the United Nations in 2000 and adopted, among others, a historic goal to reduce poverty by half by 2015. Never in human history had such a bold goal been adopted by the entire world in one voice, one that specified time and size.

I like crafts that come out of poverty or necessity. There used to be hobby shops where you'd get your supplies, and then you'd use your imagination.

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.

It's as if we live in a house which has a vast treasury in one of its rooms. Only we've forgotten about it. So, instead of living a life of royalty, we go about in poverty.

Pride breakfasted with plenty, dined with poverty, and supped with infamy.