Popular quotes about Poverty! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 74
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 TorresPolitical systems must love poverty-they produce so much of it. Poor people make easier targets for a demagogue. No Mao or even Jiang Zemin is likely to arise on the New York Stock Exchange floor. And politicians in democracies benefit from destitution, too. The US has had a broad range of poverty programs for 30 years. Those programs have failed. Millions of people are still poor. And those people vote for politicians who favor keeping the poverty programs in place. There's a conspiracy theory in there somewhere.
P. J. O'RourkeThe curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.
Martin Luther King, Jr.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.
Robert FiskThe 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 JacobsFor black America needs a politics whose first mission isn't the reinforcement of the idea of black America; and a discourse of race that isn't centrally concerned with preserving the idea of race and racial unanimity. We need something we don't yet have: a way of speaking about black poverty that doesn't falsify the reality of black advancement; a way of speaking about black advancement that doesn't distort the enduring realities of black poverty.
Henry Louis GatesPoverty arises and persists where corruption is endemic and enterprise is stifled, where basic fairness provided by the rule of law is absent. In such circumstances, poverty is an assault against human dignity, and in that assault lies the natural seed of human anger
Colin PowellWe must fight inequality and poverty if we want to re-establish peace and security. Seven million Mexicans live in extreme poverty, which is why I have launched a crusade against hunger. We also have to improve our educational system and stimulate economic growth.
Enrique Pena NietoPeople in red states and blue states can agree that if we can fight pollution and poverty at the same time, letting people work their way out of poverty without undermining community health, we have a moral obligation to do so.
Van JonesPeople say that poverty is bad, but in fact poverty is good. The poorer people are, the more revolutionary they are. It is dreadful to imagine a time when everyone will be rich... From a surplus of calories people will have two heads and four legs.
Mao ZedongPoverty is not for the sake of hardship. No, it is there because nothing exists but Allah. Poverty unlocks the door - what a blessed key!
RumiHe [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.
Rory CarrollIf 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.
Philip KapleauPoverty is a scorpion; it stings the poor and it also stings the men with high conscience who feel sad about the poverty; the rest is immune to it!
Mehmet Murat IldanThe intergenerational poverty that troubles us so much today is predominantly a poverty of values.
Dan QuayleThe first issue that compelled me was a very strange split between India being highly development scientifically (we were the third biggest scientific manpower in the world then) and yet at the same time struggling with amazing poverty. The linear equation that says that modern science equals progress and the reduction of poverty did not apply to India. It wasn't working.
Vandana ShivaThe greatest poverty in America today is time poverty. People have money, but they don't have time.
Brian TracyA few hundred years ago, perhaps 85 or even 90 percent of humanity lived below a standard of living that today only 40 or 45 percent fail to reach. But at that earlier time only part of this poverty could have been eradicated, and this at substantial cost not only to the pleasures of the affluent, but also to their well-being and to human culture. In our time, nearly all severe poverty could be eradicated at a cost to the affluent that is truly trivial.
Thomas Poggeit 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 ScottPoverty doesnโt give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.
Sherman AlexieThe poverty of yesterday was less squalid than the poverty we purchase with our industry today. Fortunes were smaller then as well.
Jorge Luis BorgesThere'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.
Richey EdwardsIn 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.
Mother TeresaThere'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 TutuIn opposition to this detachment, he finds an image of man which contains within itself man's dreams, man's illness, man's redemption from the misery of poverty - poverty which can no longer be for him a sign of the acceptance of life.
Salvatore QuasimodoAh, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all!
Edith WhartonWhen poverty declines, the need for government declines, which is why expecting government to solve poverty is like expecting a tobacco company to mount an aggressive anti-smoking campaign.
Stefan MolyneuxCapitalism 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.
Henry HazlittThe active cavalry of Scythia is always followed, in their most distant and rapid incursions, by an adequate number of spare horses, who may be occasionally used, either to redouble the speed, or to satisfy the hunger, of the barbarians. Many are the resources of courage and poverty.
Edward GibbonThe United States, in people's perverted minds, is responsible for all the destitution and all the poverty and all the victimization around the world and it is our responsibility to let all of these people in precisely because it's our fault they exist as they do.
Rush LimbaughPoverty is not something people impose on themselves for want of effort and community organisation. It is constructed by divisive and discriminatory laws, inflexible organisations, acquisitive ideologies of wealth, a deeply rooted class system and policies which serve privilege in the short term and destroy society in the long term.
Pete TownshendGod 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.
Jean-Pierre de CaussadeWe have two useless gods who never leave our island, but like to dwell in it constantly, Poverty and Helplessness.
HerodotusThe only really effective means of enabling States to deal with the grave problem of poverty is to provide them with the necessary resources through foreign financial aid - public and private - granted under reasonable conditions, within the framework of international commercial relations regulated with fairness.
Pope John Paul IIYou can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.
Bill CosbyThe conception of the necessary unit of all that is resolves itself into the poverty of the imagination, and a freer logic emancipates us from the straitwaistcoated benevolent institution, which idealism palms off as the totality of being.
Bertrand RussellThe prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
William JamesIt 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.
Jerome K. JeromeIn progressive societies the concentration[of wealth] may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.
Will DurantI have urged on woman independence of man, not that I do not think the sexes mutually needed by one another, but because in woman this fact has led to an excessive devotion, which has cooled love, degraded marriage and prevented it her sex from being what it should be to itself or the other. I wish woman to live, first for God's sake. Then she will not take what is not fit for her from a sense of weakness and poverty. Then if she finds what she needs in man embodied, she will know how to love and be worthy of being loved.
Margaret FullerAnecdote: 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.
Melanie McGrath