Quotes About Poverty

He was confronted at an early age with adult-strength realizations about powerlessness, desperation, and distrust, taking his dose right alongside the overwhelmed adults. This steady stream of shocks and realizations leaves so many boys raised in poor, urban areas stumbling toward manhood with a hardened exterior masking deep insecurities.

The richest 1 percent of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 80 percent.177

God's Word teaches a very hard, disturbing truth. Those who neglect the poor and the oppressed are really not God's people at all—no matter how frequently they practice their religious rituals nor how orthodox are their creeds and confessions.

What an ironic tragedy that an affluent, "Christian" minority in the world continues to hoard its wealth while hundreds of millions of people hover on the edge of starvation!

It is a sinful abomination for one part of the world's Christians to grow richer year by year while our brothers and sisters ache and suffer for lack of minimal health care, minimal education, and even—in some cases—enough food to escape starvation.

God thundered again and again through the prophets that worship in the context of mistreatment of the poor and disadvantaged is an outrage.

Poverty is a career for lot's of well paid people

Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.

It's difficult to believe that people are still starving in this country because food isn't available.

What we have found in this country, and maybe we're more aware of it now, is one problem that we've had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.

Instead of comforting the people, who are full of cares and wearied by their hard lives, who go to church with faith in Christianity, the priests fulminate against the workers who are on strike, and against the opponents of the government; further, they exhort them to bear poverty and oppression with humility and patience. They turn the church and the pulpit into a place of political propaganda.

Where is there beauty when you see deprivation and starvation?

Thomas Wazhashk: I am not sure what study the information about our advancement, financially speaking, was based on. But I will tell you it was faulty. Most of our people live on dirt floors, no electricity, no plumbing. I haul my own water like most Indians in this room. I consider myself advanced only because I read and write. Should I not be an Indian person because I read and write?

We don't want to leave our homes We are poor, but even poor people can love their land. You do not need money to love your home.

This instinctive repulsion which tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the very rare consolations for being so impoverished which are given to those of us who don't sell anything to anybody.

Nearly all a poor bastard's desires are punishable by jail.

We're even more dazed than usual. Here we sit, empty, bewildered, contented. We have nothing to talk about, because nothing happens to us anymore, we're too poor, maybe life is sick of us. Why not?

Death after all is only a matter of a few hours, a few minutes, but a pension is like poverty, it lasts a whole lifetime. Rich people are drunk in a different way, they can't understand this frenzy about security. Being rich is another kind of drunkenness, the forgetful kind. That, in fact, is the whole point of getting rich: to forget.

Almost every desire a poor man has is a punishable offense.

There won't be any love to spare in this world as long as there's five francs.

Il y avait ces cent sous entre nous . Ça suffit pour haïr, cent sous, et désirer qu'ils crèvent tous. Pas d'amour à perdre dans ce monde, tant qu'il y aura cent sous .

He was crushed by his enormous resignation, that basic quality that makes it as easy to kill poor bastards in and out of the army as to let them live. Poor people never, or hardly ever, ask for an explanation of all they have to put up with. They hate one another, and content themselves with that.

Perdemos a maior parte de nossa juventude por conta das inabilidades. Saltava aos olhos que ela ia me abandonar, minha bem-amada, de vez e em breve. Eu ainda não havia aprendido que existem duas humanidades muito diferentes, a dos ricos e a dos pobres. Precisei, como tantos outros, de vinte anos e da guerra para aprender a me manter na minha categoria, para perguntar o preço das coisas e dos seres antes de tocá-los, e em especial antes de desejá-los.

Me abruma la miseria humana, ya sea física o moral. Siempre existió, está bien; pero en los viejos tiempos se ofrecía a un Dios, cualquiera. Hoy, en el mundo, hay millones de personas indigentes, y su angustia ya no va a ninguna parte. Nuestro tiempo, además, es un tiempo de miseria sin arte, es lamentable. El hombre está desnudo, despojado de todo, incluso de la fe en sí mismo