Quotes About Poverty

My favorite stories are about kids who refuse to give up; their homes and schools may have been destroyed; they've probably had to rely on themselves more than a lot of adults do, and they've resisted the many bad alternatives that city life offers to poor teens.

Being broke and poor - I mean, you grow up in the environment I grew up in, grew up hard and grew up poor. Your mom doesn't have a car until you make it to the NBA... no telephone. So, I mean, if you grow up like that, and you're able to make it to this level and be blessed the way I've been blessed, it's always great to give back.

I went to Ethiopia, and it dawned on me that you can tell a starving, malnourished person because they've got a bloated belly and a bald head. And I realized that if you come through any American airport and see businessmen running through with bloated bellies and bald heads, that's malnutrition, too.

In a state of poverty, illiteracy, people just remain exposed to all kinds of manipulation. That's what we have lived. It's easier to tell a poor person, 'You know what, you are poor, you're hungry because the other one has taken away your rights.'

They don't have to tell me what life is like in a ghetto.

Let me tell you something: being broke ain't going to make nobody come to the Gospel.

We developed microfinance to fight loan sharks - I was telling people don't go to loan sharks - not trying to take advantage and make money for myself. I would be a junior loan shark if I did... It is not a panacea.

Besides being a slum kid with no great education in anything except how to fight and stay alive and steal, I also had this temper.

Being broke is a temporary situation. Being poor is a state of mind.

Extreme inequality is no temporary blip. It is hard-wired into our economies.

The poverty of a man of benevolence is not to be considered as poverty but only as his temporary inability to exercise his inherent duty.

Food in our society is a chronic poverty need, not a life-threatening one. And when we respond to a chronic need as though it were a crisis, we can predict toxic results: dependency, deception, disempowerment.

It is beginning to dawn on the world of compassion that the root causes of poverty can be addressed effectively only through development, not through one-way giving.

I have begun to publicly declare that the only thing that will enable the poor to emerge from poverty is a decent job. And the primary creators of decent jobs are businesspeople who believe deeply in the free-enterprise system.

But in spite of its bent toward self-interest, even with its excesses and inequalities, capitalism has a historic opportunity to create shared wealth that can benefit every person on the globe. I am convinced that our best hope for moving the poverty needle toward financial wellness once and for all lies with the best practices of the free market.

Why do we persist in giving away food when we know it fosters dependency?" "Because it's easier!

economists like Sachs view reality from a sanitary thirty-thousand-foot distance, not at a grassroots level where social entrepreneurs sweat over spreadsheets. The amazing gains in global poverty alleviation are primarily the result of mushroom explosions in the economies of India and China. Very little change has taken place in sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America.

Many people have a stereotype of what it means to be poor. And it may be somebody they see on the street corner with a sign: "Will work for food." And what they don't think about is that person who's struggling every day. Could be the person who waited on us, took our bank deposit, works in retail, but who is barely above the poverty line.

teacher flight from the challenges in such schools—violence and disorder, truancy, lower school readiness and English-language proficiency, less supportive home environments—means that students in these schools get a generally inferior education. Many teachers in poor schools today are doing a heroic job, driven by idealism, but in a market economy the most obvious way to attract more and better teachers to such demanding work is to improve the conditions of their employment.

Stressful conditions from outside school are much more likely to intrude into the classroom in high poverty schools. Every one of ten stressors is two to three times more common in high poverty schools-- Student hunger, unstable housing, lack of medical and dental care, caring for family members, immigration issues, community violence and safety issues.

Here the question is whether growing up in a poor neighborhood imposes any additional handicaps. The answer is yes.

Neighborhood affluence and poverty have been shown repeatedly to influence many aspects of child and youth development, even after taking into account the characteristics of kids and their immediate families.

Without succumbing to political nightmares, we might ponder whether the bleak, socially estranged future facing poor kids in America today could have unanticipated political consequences tomorrow. So quite apart from the danger that the opportunity gap poses to American prosperity, it also undermines our democracy and perhaps even our political stability.

By contrast, almost all our richer kids said that (with some qualifications) they do trust other people. That comparison reflects not paranoia on the part of poor kids, but the malevolent social realities within which they live and the fact that people and institutions have so often failed them.