Quotes About Poverty

right; maybe once you stripped away the rationalizations, it always came down to a simple matter of escape. An escape from poverty or boredom or crime or the shackles of your skin.

To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.

We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of American children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but then structure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less and less of our time.

I found myself imagining what America might look like if we could rally the country so that our government brought the same level of expertise and determination to educating our children or housing the homeless as it had to getting bin Laden; if we could apply the same persistence and resources to reducing poverty or curbing greenhouse gases or making sure every family had access to decent day care. I knew that even my own staff would dismiss these notions as utopian.

arrebataba a la gente su iniciativa y erosionaba su amor propio. Cualquier estrategia para reducir la pobreza intergeneracional debe centrarse en el trabajo, no en la asistencia social, no sólo porque el trabajo da independencia e ingresos sino también porque el trabajo aporta orden, estructura, dignidad y oportunidades de crecimiento a la vida de las personas.

According to a recent poll [...] 94% of Americans agree that people who work fulltime should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty.

You might discover that, nationwide, America's food banks are experiencing 'a torrent of need which [they] cannot meet' and that, according to a survey conducted by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, 67 percent of the adults requesting emergency food aid are people with jobs.

My aim here was much more straightforward and objective — just to see whether I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day. Besides, I've had enough unchosen encounters with poverty in my lifetime to know it's not a place you would want to visit for touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear.

You can turn away the Mexicans, the African-Americans, the teenagers and other suspect groups, but there's no fence high enough to keep out the repo man.

The discovery of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the discovery of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.

Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don't need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high.

Poor whites had always had the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own situation was deteriorating. That slender assurance is shrinking.

Si hablamos en términos globales, el mayor obstáculo para la felicidad es la pobreza. Las encuestas sobre felicidad, hasta donde podemos confiar en ellas, muestran siempre que los países más felices del mundo suelen ser los más ricos. Estados Unidos está en el puesto 23 y el Reino Unido en el 41, por ejemplo; mientras que la India aparece en el nada halagüeño puesto 125 (de 178 países).

But suburbanization, probably more than any other single factor, hid the poor from view.

Durante siglos, al menos desde la reforma protestante, las elites económicas occidentales se han regocijado en la idea de que ser pobre es una situación voluntaria. Los calvinistas la consideraban una consecuencia de la dejadez y las malas costumbres; y los pensadores positivos la atribuyen a una incapacidad obstinada para abrazar la abundancia.

Some odd optical property of our highly polarized and unequal society makes the poor almost invisible to their economic superiors.

el colapso económico debería haber convertido en historia esa idea de que la pobreza es un fracaso del individuo, o el fruto de una disfunción interna. En las colas del paro y las de la beneficencia hay tantas hormigas como cigarras, tantos optimistas habituales como depresivos crónicos.

67 percent of the adults requesting emergency food aid are people with jobs.22

Never mind that poverty, race, and occupation play a huge role in determining one's health status, the doctrine of individual responsibility means that the less-than-fit person is a suitable source not only of revulsion but resentment.

Nearly a third of the American workforce—41.7 million laborers—earn less than $12 an hour, according to a 2016 study.3

94 percent of Americans agree that "people who work full-time should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty.

No one ever said that you could work hard—harder even than you ever thought possible—and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.

nearly one-fifth of all homeless people (in twenty-nine cities across the nation) are employed in full-or part-time jobs.

Just as welfare was said to cause poverty, the experts may soon announce that Medicare causes baldness and that Social Security is a risk factor for osteoporosis: the correlations are undeniable.