Quotes About Poverty

Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.

In the era of human rights, many (though by no means all) have become less poor, but the rich have been even more decisive victors. It follows that human rights must be kept in proper perspective, neither idolized nor smashed, to recognize the true scope of our moral crisis today and the melancholy truth of our failure to invent other ideals and movements to confront it. Human rights, focused on securing enough for everyone, are essential—but they are not enough.

Worse, human rights lost their original connection with a larger egalitarian aspiration, focusing on sufficient provision instead.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau doubted it, complaining that the rise of commerce expanded hierarchies of wealth that both morally enervated the rich and fed disorder, even if they left the poor better off.

to itself, is arid, wind-swept, and unproductive. The land is flat and river-made, and therefore has no minerals whatever and almost no stone. Except for the huge reeds in the marshes, it had no trees for timber. Here, then, was a region with "the hand of God against it," an unpromising land seemingly doomed to poverty and desolation. But the people that inhabited it, the Sumerians, as they came to be known by

But to think of the clatter they make with his coach, and his own fine clothes, and yet how meanly they live within doors, and nastily, and borrowing everything of neighbors.

Indeed, it is sobering to think that the Great American Novel to come will have so little to do with the famous "American Dream" but will have to be far nearer a contemporary Les Misérables.

The woman next to me has no laces in her shoes and looks exhausted. She carries her belongings in a faded carrier bag. I cannot tell how old she is. Somewhere between forty and death.

There's nothing short of reincarnation that can change poor white trash into something respectable.

I don't know how the poor farmers deal with such situations in real life. It's really sad.

No disgrace to be poor," as Mrs. Starwood says, "but cussed unhandy.

A pobreza é um bem que encerra todos os bens do mundo. É uma grande soberania; confirmo que se assenhoreia de todos os bens quem nenhum caso faz de os deixar.

Contraception is illegal and so is abortion. History makes it clear that human beings are not capable of abstinence. The poor—wait, what did you call them? The underclasses. How do you suggest their numbers be kept to levels you find acceptable?

It was the most difficult problem they faced. A problem without a solution, and repercussions that were all too real: at one extreme another child might be born into a family of six or eight or more, living in a single room without a window or a privy. On the other extreme were the midwives and doctors who might be sent to prison or harassed until nothing remained of their careers. One

If you tempted a poor man with a fortune, who could blame the fellow for taking what he could?

The World Has Divided into Rich and Poor as at No Time in History

Most Americans probably aren't aware that there was a time in this country when tanks and cavalry were massed on Pennsylvania Avenue to chase away the unemployed.

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

At the time of independence in 1975, Mozambique was extremely poor. Many Portuguese residents abandoned the country, leaving only a handful of well-educated Mozambicans to try to run the country.

The tyranny of relativism is the spiritual poverty of our time

The bottom line is that five million low-income Americans working full time for minimum wage, deserve a raise.

Not to understand a treasure's worth till time has stole away the slighted good, is cause of half the poverty we feel, and makes the world the wilderness it is.

The time when I had desire to go to the United States I didn't have a penny. It was in the middle of the depression, you know. I couldn't get as far as Hoboken at that time.

It is shameful that millions of Americans are suffering the economic injustice of working a full-time job and earning a wage that leaves them below the poverty line.