Quotes About Poverty

It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have nothing.

One of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants to be rich. That's the American ideal. Poor people don't like talking about poverty because even though they might live in the projects surrounded by other poor people and have, like, ten dollars in the bank they don't like to think of themselves as poor.

I grew up in Nacogdoches, Texas... raised by my grandmother. We were very poor and had no indoor plumbing. My grandmother was a very religious woman, though, and she gave me a lot of faith and inner strength.

Ours is not a poor country and even though we are now a poor people, there should be no room for the despondency that has settled on large sections of the population.

There ought to be a thoughtful welfare-reform debate that doesn't turn into something that could be called scapegoating.

In certain states, if a woman makes $12,000 a year, and lives with her quarter-of-a million dollar boyfriend and they don't get married, as long as they don't get married, she gets maybe 20 or 30 thousand dollars in pre-tax benefits in terms of food stamps, health care and housing allowance.

Behind every locked door on Skid Road are a thousand stories.

And though you should live in a palace of gold, or sleep in a dried up ditch, You could never be as poor as the fairies are, and never as rich.

Indeed, nothing but smuggling kept the poor from starving to death under that Government monopoly, benevolently planned for their good.

So long as any large group of persons, anywhere on this earth, believe the ancient superstition that some Authority is responsible for their welfare, they will set up some image of that Authority and try to obey it. And the result will be poverty and war.

COMMUNISM When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food they call me a communist. Helder Camara

Cesarini had suffered poverty in his student days. He had been forced to copy out his own textbooks because he could not afford to buy them and, when he served as tutor to the sons of a wealthy family, had collected the stubs of candles after their splendid banquets in order to prolong his studies into the evening—for the acquisition of knowledge in those days required not just books but also a good supply of candles to read by.

Economists are coming to acknowledge that measures of national wealth and poverty in terms strictly of average income tell you little that is significant of the health or viability of a society.

To help the poor to a capacity for action and liberty is something essential for one's own health as well as theirs: there is a needful gift they have to offer which cannot be offered so long as they are confined by poverty.

Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Britain, the latter the colonial administrator, forcibly removed the indigenous inhabitants of the islands, the Chagossians. Most of the two thousand deportees ended up more than a thousand miles away in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they were thrown into lives of poverty and forgotten. The purpose of this expulsion was to create a major US military base on one of the Chagossian islands, Diego Garcia.

When people with money thief and build big house with the money nobody can touch them; when poor people thief a pound of beef people throw their hands in the air and shout for he to go to prison.

Medal of Honor One Man's Journey from Poverty and Prejudice

In the culture of madness 'reality' and 'representations' endlessly played off each other. What a crazy world in which the poor had to pretend to be mad in order to get a crust!

In J. H. Plumb's words, in Georgian society, 'without protection, the poor and the weak and the sick went under; the rich and the strong prospered'.

Out of 2,339 children received into London workhouses in the five years after 1750, only 168 were alive in 1755.

La maldición del vientre de las pobres: la fecundidad.

To move from poverty to middle class or middle class to wealth, an individual must give up relationships for achievement (at least for some period of time). The issue is time; there is not enough time to have both.

In 1980 the differential between the richest and poorest country in the world was 5:1 as measured by gross national product (GNP). In 2001 the differential between the richest and the poorest country in the world was 390:1 as measured by GNP.

Some people are so poor, all they have is money.