Quotes About Poverty

I know what it is to be hungry, and it is very hard when one cannot even pretend it away. -Sara

overcrowding and poverty, that defied description, as

we are so money-rich and so life-poor.

There are boys here who have to mend their shoes whatever way they can. There are boys in this class with no shoes at all. It's not their fault and it's no shame. Our Lord had no shoes. He died shoeless. Do you see Him hanging on the cross sporting shoes? Do you, boys?

but a man that drinks the money for a new baby is gone beyond the beyonds as my mother would say.

Better an English accent than an empty belly.

and the small crowd of people outside the door of the priest's house. They're waiting to beg for any food left over from the priests' dinner. There in the middle of the crowd in her dirty gray coat is my mother. This is my mother begging...

Herbert Simon, the Nobel-winning economist, took these inchoate sentiments and explained them rigorously: "What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

In my wildest imagination, I never thought that the fifth of six children born to Helen and Buddy Watts - in a poor black neighborhood, in the poor rural community of Eufaula, Oklahoma - would someday be called Congressman.

My dream is that people will find a way back home, into their bodies, to connect with the earth, to connect with each other, to connect with the poor, to connect with the broken, to connect with the needy, to connect with people calling out all around us, to connect with the beauty, poetry, the wildness.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

When you're poor, you are invisible. Every poor person will tell you nobody sees you. So being famous was me just wanting to be seen.

As we celebrate a culture of giving, however, we must also sharpen the question of how extreme wealth generation happens in the first place. And we must recognize that just societies cannot be realized merely by the willful distribution of surplus wealth.

When economist William Beveridge dreamed up the postwar welfare state he wanted to fight five 'giant evils' - want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. Fast forward 65 years and it seems the last New Labour government grew an Unfair State that fuelled - not fought - one of those evils: idleness.

When I looked further into my mother's history, I realised that her anxieties and her neuroses could be accounted for by facts from a very early age. Her parents, William Henry Jones and Sarah Emily, were desperately poor.

Even Milton Friedman - doyen of radical free market thought - was willing to consider some government intervention into primary education on the grounds that it is unfair for children to not get a chance in life because they were born to poor parents.

Bush can talk about 100,000 people wanting to go work in the police or in the army. It's because there's nothing else for them to do. They're willing to stand in line to get bombed because they want to take care of their family.

We can win respect in the world only if we are strong internally and can banish poverty and unemployment from our country.

As long as we have a poor country bordering California, it's going to be very difficult to win strikes.

Whenever I travel to a poor country, I try to help at least one person. Usually, that person helps me just as much - I can find a local poor person to be my guide or my interpreter. That person makes money from me, I make money from him or her, we both learn about each other. It's an equal win-win relationship.

Nobody wants to sell their child, but what they wind up doing is selling their child to be able to support their family.

The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-room design with a door and a window, arranged one-up, one-down, often with a shop with nothing in it on the first floor, and then a one-room apartment above it. There's street after street after street of that stuff.

I've seen schools in Detroit where the windows are broken, where there's no heat, and children are sitting with their coats on in class in the middle of a snowstorm. I've also seen schools in California with Olympic-sized swimming pools and cafeterias like five-star restaurants.

I believe that if we don't offer legal ways of emigrating to Europe and immigrating within Europe, we will be lost. If those who come - who are, generally speaking, the poor and needy - are no longer able to enter the house of Europe through the front door, they'll keep making their way in through the back windows.