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.

There is a thought that poverty is a public policy failure; poverty is man-made by action and non-action: poverty can be eliminated.

The deepest need of humans is not food and clothing and shelter, important as they are. It is God. We have mistaken the nature of poverty, and thought it was economic poverty. No, it is poverty of the soul, deprivation of God's recreating, loving peace.

If we continue on the trend we’re on, we can reduce extreme poverty by more than 60 percent-lifting more than 700 million people out of dollar-and-a-quarter a day poverty and back from the brink of hunger and malnutrition. But if we accelerate our progress from 3 percent annual reduction to over 6 percent and focus on key turnarounds in some difficult countries, we could get a 90 percent reduction. We could essentially eliminate dollar-and-a-quarter head count poverty.

The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty—it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.

Once 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.

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.

...let us recognize that extreme poverty anywhere is a threat to human security everywhere. Let us recall that poverty is a denial of human rights. For the first time in history, in this age of unprecedented wealth and technical prowess, we have the power to save humanity from this shameful scourge. Let us summon the will to do it.

I am Catholic, I was raised Catholic, I am a practicing Catholic. But I say we need to agree to disagree. We have a shared mission around poverty, and I focus on that, because we do a lot with the Catholic Church around poverty alleviation. I'm always looking for: what is the common thread? What do we care about? What do we believe in? We believe in women around the world. We believe in all lives have equal value.

‎Honoured 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.

Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society.

Poverty does not create our social problems...our social problems create our poverty.

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.

Private enterprise is not as spectacular nor as easy to see as the socialist way of temporarily diffusing poverty by eating up the seed corn - the tools - which will increase poverty in the long run.

The poverty line understates the true amount of poverty because it measures it as three times the breadbasket that a family needs, but it doesn't consider all the other things that are inflating far, far faster than food prices.

South Africa does not have a poverty problem. Poverty is a result of denialism of the way corruption taxes poor people, the inefficiencies that undermine poor people's opportunities and our refusal to admit that we are part of the problem.

People see poverty all around them in India, but they are desensitized or immune to it. I came to the conclusion that poverty is driven by lack of education.

Now, you might say – “But why should we pay people for doing what they’re supposed to do?” It’s a fair question – but think of it this way: Every other anti-poverty program that’s been tried has failed to get the national poverty rate below 11 percent... Why shouldn’t we experiment with a program built around the one strategy that has proven time and again to work wonders – capitalism?

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.

What is poverty, if not violence. Like, the number of people who die every year from starvation and from hunger and poverty is in the tens of millions.

There is extreme poverty in Appalachia, where I was, and increasingly poverty is not just an urban thing.

Poverty can't be an excuse for bad teaching, but teaching can't be the only thing we do to combat poverty.

MT [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.

Being born into poverty does not mean you are condemned to spend the rest of your life in poverty.

The 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.

Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

Is poverty of spirit the chief amongst virtues, that Jesus gives it prime place in his teachings? Is it even a virtue at all? Surely not. Manliness of spirit, honesty of spirit, fullness of rightful purpose, these are virtues; poverty of spirit is a crime.

I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.

The only way for us to come out of poverty is to work hard. Poverty means begging throughout the world.

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.

When we talk about gender pay gaps in the United States, and if you look at women without children, they earn 96 cents for every dollar that a man is earning, while for mothers it is about 76 cents. That's nearly 25 percent less. For single mothers, the situation is even worse. One third of them are living in poverty or just on the edge of poverty. This is an unacceptable situation.

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.

Security, the chief pretense of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head.

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

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.

Both poverty and wealth are excellent things, because they are extremes, but the middle ground is damaging to the soul.

Can we really believe that we are living a good life, an ethically decent life if we don't do anything serious to help reduce poverty around the world and help save the lives of children or adults who are likely to die if we don't increase the amount of aid we are giving.

Being in Marin City was like a small town so it taught me to be more [straightforward] with my style. Instead of of being so metaphorical with the rhyme, I was encouraged to go straight at it and hit it dead on and not waste time trying to cover thingsIn Marin City it seemed like things were real country. Everything was straightforward. Poverty was straightforward.

The choice of life is not between fame and fortune, nor wealth and poverty, but between good and evil.

The 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.

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

The global phenomenon of poverty tourism - or 'poorism' - has become increasingly popular during the past few years. Tourists pay to be guided through the favelas of Brazil and the shantytowns of South Africa. The recently opened Los Angeles Gang Tour carries visitors through battle-scarred territories of urban violence and deprivation.

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.

Through periodic increases over the next three decades under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, the nation achieved one of the fundamental goals of a just society, which is that no one who works for a living should have to live in poverty.

What He was, He laid aside; what He was not, He assumed. He takes upon Himself the poverty of my flesh so that I may receive the riches of His divinity.

Chile needs to unite behind the goals of reducing poverty and creating more equal opportunities so that everyone can benefit from what the country has to offer.

Poverty is the only load which is the heavier the more loved ones there are to assist in bearing it.