Quotes About Poverty

My faith tells me that God shared poverty, suffering, and death with human beings, which can only mean that such things are full of dignity and meaning, even though to believe this makes a great demand on one's faith, and to act as if this were true in any way we understand is to be ridiculous. It is ridiculous also to act as if it were not absolutely and essentially true all the same. Even though we are to do all we can to put an end to poverty and suffering.

It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor

The provisions for the poor which structure both land ownership and the sacred calendar in ancient Israel, the rights of gleaners and of those widows, orphans, and strangers who pass through the fields, and the cycles of freedom from debt and restoration of alienated persons and property, all work against the emergence of the poor as a class, as people marked by deprivation and hopelessness.

Inequality is catching.

As bread is sweet to us," he said, "so is the blood of the poor to the rich who drink it." It

Thank God you're poor, Mom.

Newspapers are enlisted to heap scorn on the arrogant bastards who choose to beg instead of starve or let their children starve. It is made clear that the poor seek charity as a great and sordid chicanery in which they delight. And there are some who do. As there are some people who delight in sticking hot needles deep into their abdomens, swallow pieces of broken bottles. A special taste.

When he wrote about class, he claimed that people with a great deal of money had to be cruel and defensive, and that the poor ought to become criminals since they had to fight laws written by the rich to protect their money. He wrote that all welfare was simply a necessary bribe to keep the poor from starting a revolution. About religion, he wrote that it should be prescribed like medication.

Honor, vengeance, that rigorous religion, those punctilicious codes of conduct - how to explain their existence here, at the end of the world, among people who possessed nothing but the rags and the lice they had on them?

One of the most damaging myths of our time is that poor countries live in poverty because of a conspiracy of the rich countries, who arrange things so as to keep them underdeveloped, in order to exploit them.

Ninguna sociedad puede ser próspera y feliz si la mayoría de sus miembros son pobres y miserables»

Ninguna sociedad puede ser próspera y feliz si la mayoría de sus miembros son pobres y miserables

los dramáticos contrastes de un país donde los trabajadores viven amontonados en un cuarto y sólo tienen derecho a comprar dos vestidos al año, mientras engordan con la satisfacción de saber que un proyectil soviético ha llegado a la luna»

Repartir la pobreza no trae riqueza a nadie y sólo contribuye a universalizar la pobreza.

Poverty is the mother of crime. —MARCUS AURELIUS

We are at the cross-ways. If we stand on in the old happy-go-lucky way, the richer classes ever growing in wealth and in number, and ever declining in responsibility, the very poor remaining plunged or plunging even deeper into helpless, hopeless misery, then I think there is nothing before us but savage strife between class and class. —WINSTON CHURCHILL, SPEECH AT LEICESTER, 1909

Well, life isn't a cakewalk, is it?! Eighty-nine percent of the world's most valuable art was created by men living in rat-infested flats. You think Velásquez wore Adidas? You think he enjoyed the luxuries of central heating and twenty-four-hour pizza delivery?!

The church's entrance was strewn with the dark immobile forms of men in bulky overcoats, asleep on cardboard boxes. They might have been dark whales, caught unaware by a tide that suddenly receded, leaving them stranded on the steps.

The Key to Paradise was for poor people. Thousands of young kids, promised a better life, exploded on the minefields with their keys around their necks.

Besides, he grew up in the city of the poor. You know as well as I do that in this country Marxism is a religious passion of the middle class.

We are like poor people, who have nothing but each other, and are happy.

the Poor Men of Lyons

There is a death far worse than physical death, and that is the death of the mind and soul, when, despite toiling night and day, under sweltering heat, torrential rain, blistering winds, you still cannot make enough to clothe, shelter and feed your loved ones, suffering miles away, forcibly separated from you.

At the root of desperate poverty, human trafficking, political violence and global inequity is a sense of scarcity and competition fueled by greed—the inordinate desire to possess wealth, goods or objects of abstract value far beyond the dictates of basic survival or comfort.