Quotes About Poverty

Poverty itself is not so bad as the poverty thought. It is the conviction that we are poor and must remain so that is fatal.

Money brings you security and choice. You can make decisions in a different way if you have a lot of money. But when you have nothing, you have a naivety, and a more fearless attitude because you have nothing to lose.

When people can't feed their children, nothing else positive happens. You don't have to look farther than the United States to see that.

When I was 13, we went back to Argentina to live for a year. I got to see my extended family - really see them: where they grew up, how they lived. It was a different kind of struggle. There is no money. There are no jobs. And they still have to find a way to feed their families.

Usually, cheap food is not nutritious. You're feeding people, but you're not really feeding people something that is good for them.

When I was a kid I got so much help from the Church. When I was a kid, our family was so poor they couldn't afford me to go to school, so there was an American family that send the money to the church to support my school fees.

It is bad enough to be white and poor; it is worse still to be black, or brown, and female, and young, and poor. Simply said, race makes class hurt more.

Britain is now living with the consequences of allowing an underclass to take root and fester.

If all we've got is the dirt poor and the filthy rich, the dirt poor would eat the filthy rich.

My father and mother do not know literacy. I cannot go to school due to financial difficulties. I started to working at a butcher as an apprentice when I was 14.

I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor.

We didn't really feel poor. You don't know that as a kid, but we really didn't have any cash. When machinery broke down, we didn't have money for parts, so we did our best to fix it.

There are plenty of African-Americans in this country - and I would say this goes right up to the White House - who are not by any means poor, but are very much afflicted by white supremacy.

During the Great Depression, African Americans were faced with problems that were not unlike those experienced by the most disadvantaged groups in society. The Great Depression had a leveling effect, and all groups really experienced hard times: poor whites, poor blacks.

Blacks are about seven times more likely to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty than whites.

For complicated historical and political reasons, we associate 'poor' in our public consciousness with 'black.' Terms such as 'welfare queen' and 'culture of poverty' became associated uniquely with the social maladies of African Americans in urban ghettos, despite the fact that poor whites outnumbered poor blacks.

Why should blacks feel elated about seeing men walk on the moon when millions of poor blacks and whites don't have enough money to buy food to eat on earth?

I graduated from Bowdoin College and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Then I left and took a job teaching really poor inner-city white kids in Boston. It was interesting to me because I'd never been around poor whites before.

Class certainly loomed large in Katrina's aftermath. Blacks of means escaped the tragedy; blacks without them suffered and died. In reality, it is how race and class interact that made the situation for the poor so horrible on the Gulf Coast. The rigid caste system that punishes poor blacks and other minorities also targets poor whites.

I grew up in South Florida, and my family was pretty poor. We weren't your upper-class whites by any means.

One consequence of racism and segregation is that many American whites know little or nothing about the daily lives of African Americans. Black America's least-understood communities are those poor, hyper-segregated places we once called ghettos. These neighborhoods are not far away, but they might as well be on the moon.

No one is so miserable as the poor person who maintains the appearance of wealth.

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.

The day every poor person in this country has a toilet in his home and his fuel requirements are met, whoever is the PM then shall rule for at least 25 years.