Popular quotes about Poverty! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 65
Inevitably, people tell me that poor folks are lazy or unintelligent, that they are somehow deserving of their poverty. However, if you begin to look at the sociological literature on poverty, a more complex picture emerges. Poverty and unemployment are part and parcel of our economic order. Without them, capitalism would cease to function effectively, and in order to continue to function, the system itself must produce poverty and an army of underemployed or unemployed people.
Bob TorresMany people theorize poverty, but so many elements of poverty, individually, for most people who theorize about poverty would be really difficult to even comprehend the individual things. Just take homelessness. If you are homeless, what does it mean not to have a post box where people can contact you; what does it mean not knowing where you're going to sleep at the end of the day; what does it mean not having a place where you can store what little you might possess. So dealing with homelessness in itself is a huge thing for most people who are commentators [on] or benefactors to poverty.
Kumi NaidooSo 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.
Muhammad YunusWhile we fight poverty in the Gulf, we also have to fight poverty across America. We should begin by returning to a promise once kept and now broken: If you work full-time, you shouldn't have to raise your children in poverty.
John EdwardPoverty 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.
J. K. RowlingOnce poverty is gone, we'll need to build museums to display its horrors to future generations. They'll wonder why poverty continued so long in human society - how a few people could live in luxury while billions dwelt in misery, deprivation and despair.
Muhammad YunusLet us never allow ourselves to think that poverty is an excuse for an invitation to totalitarianism, and if we should be tempted to think as much, let us remind ourselves that totalitarianism not only extinguishes liberty but institutionalises poverty as well
Bernard LevinThe 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.
Jacqueline NovogratzI 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.
Bruce SpringsteenWomen continue receiving less salary for the same kind of job. Women have a higher unemployment rate in our country. When you analyze the composition of poverty, you will find that most of the families in poverty are being run by a woman.
Laura ChinchillaThe fact is, mental philosophy is very like Poverty, which, you know, begins at home; and indeed, when it goes abroad, it is poverty itself.
Henry David ThoreauThe economic benefits of investing in children have been extensively documented. Investing fully in children today will ensure the well-being and productivity of future generations for decades to come. By contrast, the physical, emotional and intellectual impairment that poverty inflicts on children canmean a lifetime of suffering and want - and a legacy of poverty for the next generation.
Carol BellamyTo seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.
Jane JacobsIf we are looking for one single action which will enable the poor to overcome their poverty, I would go for credit. Money is power. I have been arguing that credit should be accepted as a human right. If we can come up with a system which allows everybody access to credit while ensuring excellent repayment - I can give you a guarantee that poverty will not last long.
Muhammad YunusThroughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded โ here and there, now and then โ are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck.
Robert A. HeinleinโHonoured sir, poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkeness is not a virtue, and that's even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary--never--no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, forasmuch as in beggary as I am ready to be the first to humiliate myself.
Fyodor DostoevskyThere are some people who say that theyยre concerned only with poverty but not inequality. But I donยt think that is a sustainable thought. A lot of poverty is, in fact, inequality because of the connection between income and capabilityยhaving adequate resources to take part in the life of the community.
Amartya SenThe poor is the central focus of my economic agenda. The poor should be strengthened in such a way that they get the willingness to defeat poverty. By helping the poor make ends meet while they remain in poverty is also one of the ways. I am not saying right or wrong but it's one of the ways.
Narendra ModiThe 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.
Pope Benedict XVII will use the rest of my life to help the poor overcome the problems confronting them - poverty is the greatest challenge facing humanity. That is why I build schools; I want to free people from poverty and illiteracy.
Nelson MandelaThis 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
Maxine Watersit 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.
Hilda ScottMartin 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.
Andrew YoungPoverty is, except where there is an actual want of food and raiment, a thing much more imaginary than real. The shame of poverty--the shame of being thought poor--it is a great and fatal weakness, though arising in this country, from the fashion of the times themselves.
William CobbettTo leave the number of births unrestricted, as is done in most states, inevitably causes poverty among the citizens, and poverty produces crime and faction.
AristotleThere'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.
Desmond TutuHow 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.
Molly IvinsMalthus 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.
John F. KennedyEJECTION, n. An approved remedy for the disease of garrulity. It is also much used in cases of extreme poverty.
Ambrose BierceThis is not about charity, it's about justice... The war against terror is bound up in the war against poverty - I didn't say that, Colin Powell said that . . .
Edward de BonoThis 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.
Aldous HuxleyThere are millions and millions of people who are thrown in the midst of poverty and starvation. Animals don't die of starvation, only human beings.
Mata AmritanandamayiBolivia also depends not only on tin and other minerals, but also depends on the gas and oil. A rational extraction should be made, taking care of the environment. We should give added value to this natural resource, and generate revenue to fight poverty with more resources, that come from natural resources.
Evo MoralesPeople who write about issues like poverty or terrorism are a part of the elite, and the distance between the elite and nonelite is growing very fast. You can move around the world but meet only people who speak your language, who share the same ideas, the same beliefs, and in doing so you can lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of the world does not think or believe in or speak the everyday discourse of the elite.
Pankaj MishraHard as it may appear in individual instances , dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful.
Thomas MalthusThere is a resentment and rejection of liberal culture. That culture is not available to many people in America. And the liberal coastal elite, who may never have been to rural America, just think everyone there is racist and homophobic and judge them to be terrible people. They think there is nothing wrong to be making jokes about 'meth heads', who are actually a group of people with poverty-related drug issues. They don't see their own hypocrisy. I think this is a huge issue and one that cannot be ignored.
Erika M. AndersonI 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.
Amy SedarisEven today we don't pay serious attention to the issue of poverty, because the powerful remain relatively untouched by it. Most people distance themselves from the issue by saying that if the poor worked harder, they wouldn't be poor.
Muhammad YunusAlthough they are some of the hardest working folks I know, rural Americans earn, on average, $11,000 less than their urban counterparts each year. And they are more likely to live in poverty.
Tom VilsackOne of the best ways countries can combat poverty is to use development assistance to promote a growing private sector, in which the poor can fully participate.
John DanilovichI really like the reggae concepts like the culture vibe. They speak on everything that's going on, they don't have limits. They speak on politics, they speak on life, they speak on the troubles of poverty, everything. The message, the melodies and the concepts of reggae music are unbelievable.
Sean KingstonYou have to go through cycles of extreme poverty and suffering for a while; they are used to that...They get up early, run hard, rest drink tea, get out and run hard again. Wehn Simon Dirorie gets up at 4 a.m. - I'm dedicated, but I'm not that dedicated.
Keith BrantlyWe grew up in abject poverty. Acting, writing scripts and skits were a way of escaping our environment at a very young age.
Viola DavisThe poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits ever since 1994. You would never learn that from most of the media. Similarly you look at those blacks that have gone on to college or finished college, the incarceration rate is some tiny fraction of what it is among those blacks who have dropped out of high school. So itโs not being black; itโs a way of life. Unfortunately, the way of life is being celebrated not only in rap music, but among the intelligentsia, is a way of life that leads to a lot of very big problems for most people.
Thomas Sowell