Quotes About Poverty

We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

One of the most durable successes of the war on poverty was to dramatically reduce the number of elderly poor in America. That's still true today. But, by contrast, child poverty has shot up over the last few years: A decade ago, about 16 percent of children in America were poor - which is a shockingly high percentage. But it's not as shocking as today, when we see that 22 percent of kids live in poverty.

We measure poverty by what I believe is a very, very crude concept. We actually measure poverty by trying to get some kind of an estimate of the minimum expenditures on food that are required to maintain health, multiplying that number by three, and saying that's the level of poverty. And it's a very crude, inaccurate arrangement.

A poverty learned with the humble, the poor, the sick and all those who are on the existential outskirts of life. A theoretical poverty is no use to us. Poverty is learned by touching the flesh of the poor Christ, in the humble, in the poor, in the sick and in children.

So i say, change the base! If you change the base, anybody will be as tall as anybody else! My belief is poverty is not caused by poor ppl. Poverty is caused by the system. Poverty is caused by the policies that we pursue.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

Plenty is the original cause of many of our needs; and even the poverty, which is so frequent and distressful in civilized nations, proceeds often from that change of manners which opulence has produced. Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries; but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.

A greater poverty than that caused by lack of money is the poverty of unawareness. Men and women go about the world unaware of the beauty, the goodness, the glories in it. Their souls are poor. It is better to have a poor pocketbook than to suffer from a poor soul.

Fundamentalism is not bred in poverty. There are plenty of poor countries in the world that don't have violence because amid the poverty there is a kind of justice and in some countries a democracy.

To say that poverty explains terror is to slander those caught in poverty who choose to lead worthy lives. [Terrorists] are not the oppressed, but they are the parasites of the oppressed.

I think in some ways it would make more sense to have as a poverty level a relative concept and say, the level of poverty is that level of income or that level of consumption below which 10 percent of the people now are.

Poverty is relative, and the lack of food and of the necessities of life is not necessarily a hardship. Spiritual and social ostracism, the invasion of your privacy, are what constitute the pain of poverty

The poor of the world cannot be made rich by the 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.

I have heard it said that families with many children and high birth rates are among the cause of poverty. It seems to me a simplistic opinion. I can say that the main cause of poverty is an economic system that has removed the person from the center.

Unhappiness doesn't grow on the chest like leprosy. Poverty won't fall off the roof like a loose tile, no; poverty and unhappiness are man's doing.

We think of poverty as a condition simply meaning a lack of funds, no money, but when one sees fifth, sixth, and seventh generation poor, it is clear that poverty is as complicated as high finance.

The obscenities of this country are not girls like you. It is the poverty which is obscene, and the criminal irresponsibility of the leaders who make this poverty a deadening reality. The obscenities in this country are the places of the rich, the new hotels made at the expense of the people, the hospitals where the poor die when they get sick because they don't have the money either for medicines or services. It is only in this light that the real definition of obscenity should be made.

Many people believe in eliminating gaps and eliminating poverty. They don't realize that in some sense those two things are antithetical. If you were to double everyone's income, or if everyone's income were doubled naturally over the course of time, then you would reduce poverty significantly but you would have also increased the gap.

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.

Poverty in itself does not make men into a rabble; a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the government.

[A] family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line. That's wrong. That's why, since the last time this Congress raised the minimum wage, 19 states have chosen to bump theirs even higher. Tonight, let's declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour.

Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.

Martin Luther King was talking about racism, war and poverty. I think we have made progress enormous progress in racism and war, but we have made little or no progress in poverty. And it's because the economy has gotten more and more complex as we have globalized.

It seems to me that large numbers of people are now paying attention to poverty and that large numbers now understand that blaming the poor and the insecure for being poor and insecure is as unseemly as is schoolyard bullying. In that realization lies hope for a reinvigorated discourse around poverty and inequity in modern-day America.

There's an awful lot of white British kids who have never really gone hungry, always had a roof to live under but at the same time are desperately unhappy. It's not total poverty, just a poverty of ideas.

There's no way in which you can ever win a war against terror. As long as there are conditions in many parts of the world that make people desperate: poverty, disease, ignorance, etc. I hope that we will discover soon, that we can survive, only together. We can prosper only together. And I think people are beginning to realize this, that you can't have pockets of prosperity in one part of the world and huge deserts of poverty and deprivation and think you can have a stable, secure world.

When I pick up a person from the street, hungry, I give him a plate of rice, a piece of bread. But a person who is shut out, who feels unwanted, unloved, terrified, the person who has been thrown out of society - that spiritual poverty is much harder to overcome. And abortion, which often follows from contraception, brings a people to be spiritually poor, and that is the worst poverty and the most difficult to overcome.

poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes. Analogically, heat is a result of active processes; it has causes. But cold is not the result of any processes; it is only the absence of heat. Just so, the great cold of poverty and economic stagnation is merely the absence of economic development.

Capitalism will continue to eliminate mass poverty in more and more places and to an increasingly marked extent if it is merely permitted to do so.

Money can't buy happiness, but neither can poverty.

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

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.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. And it will leave you unfulfilled.

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.

When you resolve to become pious, the devil in your nature cries out at you, "Tread not those paths, O confused one; distress and poverty will overcome you. You will be despised, let down by friends, you will regret it." Dread of the devil has bound their souls; the cries of the devil are the drover of the damned; the call of the Lord is a guardian of the saints.

It is easy enough to say that poverty is no crime. No; if it were men wouldn't be ashamed of it. It is a blunder, though, and is punished as such. A poor man is despised the whole world over.

I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.

Even today, if my title hadn't been given back to me and I was in such poverty where I had to go and find a job, I would have done that.

Religion must be used in furthering great works of justice and reform. It must be used to establish right relations between different groups of men, and thus to make a reality of brotherhood. It must be used to abolish poverty, the breeding ground of all misery and crime, by distributing equably among men the abundance of the soil. And it must be used to get rid of war and to establish enduring peace. Here is the supreme test of the effectiveness of religion.

We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.

Our life of poverty is as necessary as the work itself. Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God better because of them.

Anything would be better in the US than what you have. As a government it's really very low quality, given the fact that this country produces eminent intellectuals, has great universities, and then the people who arrive in government are very mediocre. The Latin American situation has been very different in the first place, because writers have spoken for those who have no voice. The rate of illiteracy, poverty, joblessness in Latin America has been so great throughout our history that if the writers didn't speak out for the people, nobody would.

Extreme poverty anywhere is a threat to human security everywhere.

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 many cases in which gifted children have done great things without special school programs. There are also gifted kids who have been to special schools and achieved nothing that has benefited the world as a whole. Without solid evidence, I have no confidence that funding school programs for the intellectually gifted would do more good than the most cost-effective programs to help people in extreme poverty.

For me the only point that has remained unchanged through the years is that in India there is still so much poverty.

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

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