Quotes About Poverty

Spirituality without boundaries. All voices heard. Reverence for the natural world. We don't need to attend lavish services paid for with prayer fees and massive tithes . . . while beggars and others starve outside the cathedrals. It's not fair for one group to have so much wealth and another so little.

You can dream on welfare. You can hope as you take in ironing. It is just less painful if you don't.

Even though his pocket's were empty as a banker's soul, even though his family was poor as poor got outside the shanty towns of the depression, he wore his pride like a suit of mail (...) I think it's much more civilized to knock someone on their ass, than the cuss yourself into an embolism, like they do in New York.

Even though his pockets were empty as a banker's soul, even though his family was as poor as poor could get outside the shanty towns of the depression, he wore his pride like mail. (...) I think it is much more civilized to knock someone on his ass than cuss yourself into an embolism, like they do in New York

Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it.

It is a common condition of being poor... you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.

I know how silly and paranoid that sounds, especially coming from a man who gets a perverse thrill from taking chances. But it is a common condition of being poor white trash: you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.

The only thing poverty does is grind down your nerve endings to a point that you can work harder and stoop lower than most people are willing to. It chips away a person's dreams to the point that the hopelessness shows through, and the dreamer accepts that hard work and borrowed houses are all this life will ever be.

He concluded, "While there may have been extremist groups who grasped the opportunity to exploit the violence…to state that the riots were Communist or otherwise inspired appears to me to be a lame excuse to salve the consciences of those who do not want to, or refuse to, face the conditions that precipitated this disaster and similar ones in other great cities of our nation: rat-infested slums, unemployment, poverty, hopelessness, frustration, and despair.

So Newark had the highest percentage of substandard housing of any American city: 7,097 units had no flush toilets; 28,795, no heaters. Twenty-eight babies died in a diarrhea epidemic in 1965, eighteen of them at City Hospital, which was also infested by bats.

The Obama administration now has regulations that tells them that they can no longer promote marriage to these young girls. They can no longer promote marriage as a way of avoiding poverty and bad choices that they make in their life. They can no longer even teach abstinence education. They have to be neutral with respect to how people behave.

Feed the hungry and you're a saint, ask why they are hungry and you're a communist.

Travelers recognize that the results of an election here in the US can have a greater impact on poor people half a world away than it does on middle-class American voters. My travels have taught me that, even if motived only by greed, you don't want to be really rich in a desperately poor world. With this in mind, I think of it not as noble or heroic, but simply pragmatic to bring a compassion for the needy along with me into the voting booth.

It is said that if you give £500 to a rich person they could turn it into a million one day, and if you give £500 to a poor person they will turn it into an iPhone.

In all, 62 percent of the budget cuts would come from low-income programs. Yet at the same time, the Republican budget would provide a substantial tax cut to the rich—who are already taking home an almost unprecedented share of the nation's total income.

Current patterns of economic segregation make a self-fulfilling prophecy of the claim that the poor are not like the rest of us.

more than one in three young families with children (headed by someone thirty or under) were living in poverty in 2010, according to an analysis of census data by Northeastern University's

Listen carefully to today's Republican right and you hear the same social Darwinism that was used more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: survival of the fittest. Don't help the poor or the unemployed or anyone who's fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.

The 400 richest Americans now have more wealth than the entire bottom half of earners—150 million Americans—put together.

The simultaneous rise of both the working poor and non-working rich offers further evidence that earnings no longer correlate with effort.

It is no great feat for an economy to create a large number of very-low-wage jobs. Slavery, after all, was a full employment system.

Using the official $1 per day line, we estimate that [from 1970 to 2006] world poverty rates have fallen by 80 percent.

Some hae meat and cann eat, And some wad eat that want it; But we hae meat, and we can eat, And sae the Lord be thankit.

Should the poor be flattered?—Shakespeare.