Quotes About Poverty

My story, is how a kid that's born into really destitute poverty on a little dirt road in Florida winds up in one of the largest bands in history.

One thing lots of Christians do have in common is that they can't help coming across as smug. This winds lots of people up, particularly because famous Christians pronounce on the life of the poor from their very lovely affluent homes filled with their very lovely families and attractive pets.

The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly.

There's some way in which we would prefer not to see very clearly the immense gifts and intelligence of some of the people who live in our most abject conditions. Maybe there are some things at work in deciding who gets to be society's winners and who gets to be society's losers that don't have to do with merit.

Our elected officials would do well to remember that the most prosperous countries are those that allow consumers - not governments - to direct the use of resources. Allowing the government to pick winners and losers hurts almost everyone, especially our poorest citizens.

I will never not know where I came from. I can be in the biggest house, the best apartment, winning Tonys and Grammys and whatever, and I will always remember waiting in line for government cheese and bread and having food stamps. I had a tough life, and I will never not know the way I was raised and the place where I was raised.

We will not overcome world poverty unless we manage climate change successfully. I've spent my life as a development economist, and it's crystal clear that we succeed or fail on winning the battle against world poverty and managing climate change together. If we fail on one, we fail on the other.

The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it's all there, part of the story of an English people whose grandparents never had it so good.

A Texas girl who grew up in terrible poverty, I ended up leading a pretty glamorous life.

There are children who are working in textile businesses in Asia who would be prostitutes on the streets if they did not have those jobs.

The texture and hardship of poverty and eviction is something that I think left the deepest impression on me, and I hope that I try to convey a little bit of that to the reader.

When I was a kid in junior high, I had an assignment to discuss how to rescue poor people in India. I remember my teacher at the time considered it an impossible problem. Now, we're not talking that way anymore. We're sure not talking about that for China. They're rescuing themselves thanks to globalization.

The first thing we need to understand when we think about globalization is that it has benefited an enormous number of people who are not part of the global elite.

So the first thing you need to do about conflict is to prevent it, and the best way of preventing it is by dealing with the question of poverty.

First we have to recognize that the cause of poverty is both structural and behavioral. And the first thing about the behavior part is that we need a moral revolution within the African American community. Look - no white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.

The government of Macau, of China, has been empirical and pragmatic and has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, a feat unequaled in the history of civilization in any country.

If Jeff Bezos and I had started Amazon.com in a poverty-stricken corner of Africa, there would have been no job creation because there would be no people to buy the stuff from Amazon.com. The difference here is the American middle class, which is by every measure the most extraordinary economic achievement in the history of the world.

Once one of the most important steel manufacturing centers in the world, Braddock - what's left of it - solemnly affirms one of the great economic maxims of our society: socialism for the rich, and capitalism for the poor.

Poverty dictated my childhood. But there were benefits as well: I became independent, more mature than my peers, and I realized that money is not the most important thing in life.

The one thing that made me somewhat of an animal is I didn't have anything growing up.

I grew up without any money, but the one thing that we did was sit up in the gods to watch the ballet.

Not only am I literally and figuratively the dark horse, I'm actually the poor horse. The only thing that I have going for me is my soul and my commitment to the American people.

Social Security is the only thing most Americans can count on to keep them out of poverty during retirement.

The last thing the theatre owners wanted was for people who spent $200 to see 'Les Miserables' to come out again and see the real miserable children of America, right there on the sidewalk.