Quotes About Poverty

Sport is how poor kids from poor countries pass through the eye of the needle to riches and recognition.

Bem sei que os pobres só podem falar de dinheiro, mas falar de dinheiro nunca enriqueceu ninguém.

At the city gates a corpse or two hung, moldering, from the municipal gallows. Within the walls, there were the usual dirty streets, the customary gamut of smells, from wood smoke to excrement, from geese to incense, from baking bread to horses, swine and unwashed humanity. Peasants

I don't like dealing with money transactions in poor countries. I get confused between feeling that I shouldn't haggle with poverty and hating getting ripped off.

It would be good if there could be an end to need in this world; it would be good if people did not have to worry about what would happen to them if their crops failed, or if their cattle got sick and died, or if they lost the jobs on which they, along with a number of hungry mouths, depended.

All over the world, I think, it is much the same. People want to escape places where there is war and poverty, and not enough water even. Or too much water. And they look at places where there is peace and good government and they think: Why can't I go there? They just want to work and have a roof over their heads and not wake up to the sound of bombs and gunfire. That's all they want.

Penury was a matter of hard chairs and mean cushions; prosperity—old money—was a matter of feathers: an absurd reductionist view of it, but at times quite strikingly true.

Tell him that riches will not procure for you a single moment of happiness. Luxury consoles poverty alone, and at that only for a short time, until one becomes accustomed to it.

There lies the cause of the rapid decline of our nobility: the grandfather was rich, the son is in need, the grandson goes begging.

The schools wear the blank faces of war buildings, their windows blown blind by rocks or guns or mortars. Their plaster is an acne of bullet marks. The huts and small houses crouch open and vulnerable; their doors are flimsy pieces of plyboard or sacks hanging and lank. Children and chickens and dogs scratch in the red, raw soil and stare at us as we drive through their open, eroding lives.

It was a land of almost breathtaking beauty or of savage poverty; a land of screaming ghosts or of sun-flung possibilities; a land of inviting warmth or of desperate drought. How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or living in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.

Starvation! exclaimed the abbe, springing from his seat. Why, the vilest animals are not suffered to die by such a death as that. The very dogs that wander houseless and homeless in the streets find some pitying hand to cast them a mouthful of bread; and that a man, a Christian, should be allowed to perish of hunger in the midst of other men who call themselves Christians, is too horrible for belief. Oh, it is impossible - utterly impossible!

Poverty and loneliness could be seen as a liberation from strivings to become rich and popular.

We see no reason why a sustainable world needs to leave anyone living in poverty. Quite the contrary, we think such a world would have to provide material security to all its people.

If current predictions of population growth prove accurate and patterns of human activity on the planet remain unchanged, science and technology may not be able to prevent either irreversible degradation of the environment or continued poverty for much of the world. —ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON AND U.S. NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, 1992

The central question of economic development is how to keep the reinforcing loop of capital accumulation from growing more slowly than the reinforcing loop of population growth—so that people are getting richer instead of poorer.

Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed.

We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.

There are two things you should know about the poor: they tend to smell, and they are ungrateful.

Every one of us who was attracted to the poor had a sense of guilt, of responsibility, a feeling that in some way we were living on the labor of others. The fact that we were born in a certain environment, were enabled to go to school, were endowed with the ability to compete with others and hold our own, that we had few physical disabilities—all these things marked us as the privileged in a way.

Money isn't the root of all evil; the love of money isn't the root of all evil; the NEED for money is the root of all evil.

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

Eisenhower started his presidency on this same note, with a plea to avoid what he called the "burden of arms. . . . Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This "out of sight, out of mind" externalization of poverty and poison doesn't go away just because we've covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality.