Quotes About Poverty

Most Americans believe that if you work hard and full-time, you should not be poor. But the truth is that many working families are, and many low-income breadwinners must hold down multiple jobs just to survive.

If you're totally illiterate and living on one dollar a day, the benefits of globalization never come to you.

Well, as you know, there are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people cant. But I dont believe that the Federal Government should take action to try to make these opportunities exactly equal, particularly when there is a moral factor involved.

Poverty was the greatest motivating factor in my life.

There is one law for rich and poor alike, which prevents them equally from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges.

O pobre sozinho, sem um cavalo, fica no seu, permanece, feito numa crôa ou ilha, em sua beira de vereda. Homem a pé, esses Gerais comem.

The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.

A sated man cannot understand a starving one

We need to try to see individuals in order to do any kind of justice. The idea of a binary world of monsters and saints whose unchanging goodness or badness is evident from one or a few actions, from their poverty, or from their race, is false" - Larry Krasner

And while you were out working to pay the rent on this stinking, rotten place, why, the street outside played nursemaid to your kid. The street did more than that. It became both mother and father and trained your kid for you, and it was an evil father and a vicious mother, and, of course, you helped the street along by talking to him about money.

Lutie watched her from the front porch. Damn white people, she thought. Damn them. And then—but it isn't that woman's fault. It's your fault. That's right, but the reason Pop came here to live was because he couldn't get a job and we had to have the State children because Jim couldn't get a job. Damn white people, she repeated.

Dear! Dear! To see how gentlefolks can afford to throw away their happiness! Now, if you were poor people, there would be none of this. To talk of unworthiness, and not caring about one another, when I know there are not such a kind-hearted lady and gentlemen in the whole province, nor any that love one another half so well, if truth was spoken!

How strange it is, that a fool or a knave, with riches, should be treated with more respect by the world, than a good man, or a wise man in poverty!

Surely,' said she, 'there is some magic in wealth, which can thus make persons pay their court to it, when it does not even benefit themselves. How strange it is, that a fool or a knave, with riches, should be treated with more respect by the world, than a good man, or a wise man in poverty!

Anfering sex for money is not a profession that glorifies women; it is a profession born of desperation, poverty, alieatioin, and loneliness.

Mary Barton,

There are many compelling reasons why social scientists should turn more attention to the situation of whites in the underclass. Prime among these is that researchers and politicians have constructed a grossly distorted image of poverty in this country. While whites constitute a vast majority of the poor population in the United States, blackness composes the most familiar visage in representations of poverty.

The eugenic family studies had a very pronounced influence on social policy and medical practice in the early twentieth century. Conservative politicians used them effectively as propaganda in their call to end all forms of welfare and private giving to the poor. The burgeoning medical and psychiatric establishments used them to enlarge their fields, resulting in the involuntary sterilization and forced institutionalization of large numbers of rural poor whites.

In a country so steeped in the myth of classlessness, in a culture where we are often at a loss to explain or understand poverty, the white trash stereotype serves as a useful way of blaming the poor for being poor.

In the train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided.

Unless that elite soon comes to recognize the value and the importance of all of Russia's citizens, to honor both their civil and their human rights, Russia is ultimately fated to become today's northern Zaire, a land populated by impoverished peasants and billionaire politicians who keep their assets in Swiss bank vaults and their private jets on runways, engines running. Tragically

The fact that Anna is somewhere having coffee or a dream is an assault on me. I hate these moments of poverty. What does man eat? ask the phenomenologists. Like the dogs, names, down there, starving.

When an ecstatic is asked the question, What is it that love dares the self to do? she will answer: Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.

The fact that Anna is somewhere having coffee or a dream is an assault on me. I hate these moments of poverty, What does man eat? ask the phenomenologists. Likes the dogs, names, down there, starving.