Quotes About Poverty

Extreme poverty threatens people's right to life itself and makes impossible the enjoyment of the rights and freedoms essential to a humane way of life.

However important the struggle is and however much misery and poverty and degradation exist, we know that it cannot be more important than one human life.

That trip to India, the poverty. No God I can imagine would let that happen. Then I came home and started noticing i on he streets of New York. People sick and starving in one of the richest nations in the world. I just - I can't think that anyone's watching over those people. Which means no one is watching over me, either.

To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

from the middle-middle classes, whose highest desire seemed shelter – continuous shelter – not a lair in the darkness to be reached against fear, but shelter everywhere and always, until the existence of earth and sky is forgotten, shelter from poverty and disease and violence and impoliteness; and consequently from joy; God slipped this retribution in.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.

He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food.

To alter poor people until they became exactly like the people who were not so poor

A child who has slept all night in a stuffy, overcrowded room, and then breakfasts on a cup of weak tea and a piece of bread, can hardly be expected to show a sharp, sustained interest in the abstractions of arithmetic, and the unrelated niceties of correct spelling. Punishment (or the threat of it) for this lack of interest is unlikely to bring the best out of him.

Nowhere is the gap between rich and poor wider, nowhere are the rich richer and the poor poorer, than in those societies that do not permit the free market to operate." – Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, Chapter 5

poverty is not interesting, either to the poor or to the rich. It is the curse of the decent poor to be so utterly uninteresting that immoral people can hide them and moral people cannot find them.

He had thought of childhood as something intimate and pure, inside his home, his family. Instead of that, in Deborah's school he had been disturbed and thrilled by the presence all around him of something wild, barbaric, dark, compounded of the city streets, of surging crowds, of rushing feet, of turmoil, filth, disease and death, of poverty and vice and crime.

Most white Americans today tend to see poverty in individual instead of systemic terms, having much to do with our national commitment to individualism. But African Americans know that whatever the system is, it is rigged in the favor of white people. It's not just about

King conveyed the gravity of the moment in 1968 and the necessity for the Poor People's Campaign, he conjured, without a hint of nostalgia, a history of the heroism of everyday people acting against all odds, a history no less full of disappointment and trauma. He

King wanted to make the case for massive direct action in Washington, D.C., on behalf of America's poor, but he would need to marshal greater financial resources than ever before. Desegregating lunch counters didn't cost much, but ending poverty would cost the nation billions of dollars. Sentimentality alone could not pay the bill.

The lynched relative; the buried son or daughter killed at the hands of the police; the millions locked away to rot in prisons; the children languishing in failed schools; the smothering, concentrated poverty passed down from generation to generation; and the indifference to lives lived in the shadows of the American dream are generally understood as exceptions to the American story, not the rule. Blasphemous facts must be banished from view by a host of public rituals and incantations.

Suppose a boy steals an apple From the tray at the grocery store, And they all begin to call him a thief, The editor, minister, judge, and all the people – «A thief», «a thief», «a thief», wherever he goes. And he can't get work, and he can't get bread Without stealing it, why the boy will steal. It's the way people regard the theft of an apple That makes the boy what he is.

The very poor are materialistic. It takes money to be a mystic.

And in heaven's name, who are the public enemies?" exclaimed Dr. Leete. "Are they France, England Germany or hunger, cold and nakedness?

The folly of men not their hard heartedness was the great cause of the world s poverty.

When the image of her comes up on a sudden—just as my bad demons do—and I see again her dyed henna hair, the eyes dwarfed by the electric lights in the Star Lady Barber Shop, and the dear, broken wing of her mouth, and when I regard her wild tatters, I know that not even Solomon in his lilied raiment was so glorious as my mother in her rags. Selah.

Them that's got shall get,Them that's not shall lose,So the Bible said, and it still is news.Mama may have,Papa may have,But God bless the child that's got his own!

It's the same the whole world over,It's the poor wot gets the blame,It's the rich wot gets the pleasure,Ain't it all a bloomin' shame?