Quotes About Poverty

Some people might hate someone who is successful, but in Peru, they love it! It makes them feel they can be successful, too. That's a good state of mind for a country that wants to come out of poverty.

What I find curious is that I ever became a writer at all. I grew up in the South Bronx, the land of poverty and petty hoodlums.

I grew up in Northern Ireland, in the middle of nowhere, and when you are poor, you are really poor. And when you are rich, you are very rich. This is not a new phenomenon.

I wanted to write a book about poverty that wasn't only about the poor. I was looking for some sort of narrative device, a phenomenon that would allow me to draw in a lot of different players. I was like, 'Shoot, eviction does that.'

I want the people of the Philippines to be happy, even if they have nothing.

I would wake up every day, and put on a pair of shoes, never thinking about what it would be like to go without. After seeing people walking the streets of Phoenix, without anything on their feet, I knew I had to do something to help.

I had someone call me this morning telling me they had somebody who would only work a certain number of hours a week because if they worked too many hours a week then they couldn't get their government assistance. And that person has multiple cell phones, and gets them new every month with new minutes.

The first things I did was I was a writer, painter, and photographer, and we grew up very poor, so even though I could get into any college I wanted, there was no way to pay for it.

Poor but happy is not a phrase invented by a poor person.

'Redistributing the wealth' - that phrase gets used so much that you almost get numb to it.

When I was very small, the electricity was turned off because we didn't pay the bill. I remember sitting by the oil lamp listening to my mother playing 'Careless Love' on the piano.

Growing up, we didn't have any money - we shopped where you picked your shoes out of a bin. When I was little, I said, 'When I grow up, I'm going to have nice shoes.'

I was never very good at picking cotton, and then I only made fifty cents or $1 a day. People would work for $1 a day during the Depression. So we would get $2 for playing music and just having fun. I think that as a result of that it was not just the money, but we enjoyed doing it.

I was never, like, picking on people or anything like that. I was more the other way around. I was a little insecure, I was broke.

You can't run the economy on BMWs alone. If the average person is in a pickle, how do you have a healthy economy?

People who live inside garbage piles - that should not be happening.

I do think that humanitarians and journalists alike have focused on all the things that go wrong, and that they sometimes leave the perception in the public that the war on poverty has been lost. That Africa is just a bottomless pit of despair. When, in fact, really the opposite is true on both fronts.

You have friends, and they die. You have a disease, someone you care about has a disease, Wall Street people are scamming everyone, the poor get poorer, the rich get richer. That's what we're surrounded by all the time.

The Roosevelt enactment of Social Security was a moral revolution in our country: We were assured that we would never reach the very depths of poverty. And to be told, that we are now going to gamble it, on Wall Street, is nonsense!

Wall Street is in trouble because Main Street is broke.

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month's rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene.

I grew up in a little town in Arkansas called Clarksville and it was a weird existence, you know? I grew up white trash; we had holes in our walls.

'The Glass Castle' by Jeannette Walls is the quintessential dysfunctional family.

'Crumbling' Down' is a very political song that I wrote with my childhood friend George Green. Reagan was president - he was deregulating everything, and the walls were crumbling down on the poor.