Quotes About Poverty

Inequality is not the same as poverty, and it is not a fundamental dimension of human flourishing.

The economist Steven Radelet has pointed out that "the improvements in health among the global poor in the last few decades are so large and widespread that they rank among the greatest achievements in human history.

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind.

The first countries that made the Great Escape from universal poverty in the 19th century, and the countries that have grown the fastest ever since, are the countries that educated their children most intensely.5

In the United States, the share of income going to the richest one percent grew from 8 percent in 1980 to 18 percent in 2015, while the share going to the richest tenth of one percent grew from 2 percent to 8 percent.

As the economist Max Roser points out, news sites could have run the headline 137,000 People Escaped Extreme Poverty Yesterday every day for the past twenty-five years.33 But they never ran the headline, because there was never a Thursday in October in which it suddenly happened. So one of the greatest developments in human history—a billion and a quarter people escaping from squalor—has gone unnoticed.

Which policies will in fact bring about things that almost everyone wants, like lasting peace or economic growth? Which will reduce poverty, or violent crime, or illiteracy? A rational society should seek the answers by consulting the world rather than assuming the omniscience of a bloc of opinionators who have coalesced around a creed.

Today people are suffering from poverty, but also from lack of love

There is hunger for ordinary bread, and there is hunger for love, for kindness, for thoughtfulness, and this is the great poverty that makes people suffer so much.

I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money.

Selfishness comes from poverty in the heart, from the belief that love is not abundant.

We grew up as poor people but we never knew poverty. I still love and miss the Somalia I grew up in. Things changed, when my father became a diplomat later on.

According to our Christian ethics, we're supposed to love God, love each other and help take care of the poor. It is immoral to charge somebody making $5,000 an income tax.

When people love each other, they are content with very little. When we have light and joy in our hearts, we don't need material wealth. The most loving communities are often the poorest.

Poor and afflicted and oppressed people have faces, and we are required to look squarely into them. We can't love what we won't experience.

There is no poverty in life when you have a loving, peaceful, happy family. They are a gift which cannot be bought nor traded for gold.

Who dare to love their country, and be poor.

He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.

The rich fop Francis of Assisi was bored all his life-until he fell in love with Christ and gave all his stuff away and became the troubadour of Lady Poverty.

Among our tasks as witnesses to the love of Christ is that of giving a voice to the cry of the poor.

The tax collector must love poor people, he's creating so many of them.

The cause of poverty is not scarcity. It is fear and small thinking.

When the aristocracy catches a cold, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia.

I came to understand, through the great George Orwell, that much of such thinking found its motivation in hatred of the rich and successful, instead of true regard for the poor. Besides, the socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish.