Quotes About Poverty

We hear time and again what a prosperous, affluent country Britain is, the sixth richest in the world. But aren't we ashamed that people who need emergency food handouts are eating cold beans and stewed steak from the tin, or handing it back, because they can't even heat it up?

In the Dominican Republic, my mom and I lived in this little tiny town called Cabarete, which is very poor.

Through my studies, I became increasingly disillusioned with the international aid system. I think we systematically deny poor people the chance to engage as equals in the global economic order. At best, we give them handouts or tiny loans and hope they will suffer a bit less from extreme poverty. We don't view them as equals.

I grew up in Brooklyn, in what I now know was poverty. Sharing a tiny bedroom with my two brothers, eating government cheese and passing down sneakers until they were unpassable... I simply thought the whole world lived as such, especially in pre-gentrified Williamsburg of the 1980s.

Somebody has been cashing checks, and they've been bouncing back on us. And these people, the poor class of Negroes and the poor class of white people, they're getting tired of it.

Once you become poor, tired and time-constrained, you become a much better human being.

Most organizations should be pro-active, but philanthropists concerned with poverty should deliberately be reactive, learning from the efforts of ordinary folks who tired of looking the other way as their communities fell apart.

If a novel were written about Florida's administration of its healthcare for the working poor, an appropriate title might be: 'Don't get sick, and God help you if you do.'

I feel like I grew up being babysat by a television, and all I ever wanted to do was be in movies, direct movies, make movies, but it took me a really long time to be honest with myself about it because my background is that my family was very poor.

In my first book, 'A Return to Love', I wrote about things in the outer world that need to change - how we need to ameliorate deep poverty, heal the earth, end war.

I had to steal to survive.

I was a very poor young black boy in New Orleans, just a face without a name, swimming in a sea of poverty trying to survive.

I think that New York City in the year 1900 was a very difficult place to survive.

When Kogi started, I was dead broke, selling tacos on the street just to survive.

I don't think people understand that being poor means you have to work from dawn until dusk just to survive through the day. I think there's some notion that poor people lie about all day not doing anything.

In Latin America, many people live with outstretched hands. Throughout the hemisphere, paternalistic governments accustom people to receiving just enough to survive instead of participating in society.

Because I was poor I had one special advantage. When you are poor, and basic survival is your concern, you have no alternative but to be an entrepreneur. You must take action to survive just as you must take action to seize an opportunity.

Even when I was living below the poverty line as a novelist, I was still living better than 99.5% of the human population of the world. But in my little, soft realm of trying to amuse a few dozen middle-class people with my books and articles, I did struggle to survive in my own way.

We continue to see our elected officials working extra hard to create a 'good climate for business' that leads to disinvestment in public infrastructure and tax incentives to the detriment of cities, while enriching private business and further entrenching poverty. And our cities are told by legislators to use their bootstraps to survive.

When you grow up in poverty and learn how to survive it, it's something that stays with you forever.

You know you poor when you eatin' breakfast food late. You fryin' toast? At nine o'clock at night? With bacon? You're broke.

You know, the last time America sensationalized an actor from India, the man died a poor, miserable soul: He was Sabu, the elephant boy. He came here and was the toast of Hollywood. And he just went back to India and died a pauper.

The notion that aid can alleviate systemic poverty, and has done so, is a myth. Millions in Africa are poorer today because of aid; misery and poverty have not ended but increased. Aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world.

Today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world - out of six billion people, more than three billion - do not qualify to take out a loan from a bank. This is a shame.