Quotes About Poverty

Inevitably, people tell me that poor folks are lazy or unintelligent, that they are somehow deserving of their poverty. However, if you begin to look at the sociological literature on poverty, a more complex picture emerges. Poverty and unemployment are part and parcel of our economic order. Without them, capitalism would cease to function effectively, and in order to continue to function, the system itself must produce poverty and an army of underemployed or unemployed people.

If we're all led to believe that poverty is just a matter of laziness or stupidity or whatever other justifications we come up with, then we're not likely to be in a real position to do much about it when it comes to attacking the root causes of the problem. Instead of demanding a more equitable system for the distribution of social and economic goods, we blame the victim.

Poverty and hardship are created by false thinking.

From outside comes the strident clamor of slogans over a loudspeaker and an accordion optimistically paints cheap color prints. And yet there is not a single flower on the laborers' table, not one little bouquet for the world to lean on.

Gold gives the appearance of beauty even to ugliness; but everything becomes frightful with poverty.

I had liefer that thou shouldst strip the altar of the glorious Virgin, when our need demandeth it, than that thou shouldst attempt aught, be it but a little thing, against our vow of poverty and the observance of the Gospel. For the Blessed Virgin would be better pleased that her altar should be despoiled, and the counsel of the Holy Gospel perfectly fulfilled, than that her altar should be adorned, and the counsel given by her Son set aside.

Some of the swimmers, like the security guards from Peru or Nepal, they were so poor—they lived a hard life and sent all of their money home," Jay says. "The fact that someone would give them a cap or a two-dollar pair of goggles meant a lot." He paid for the gear out of his own pocket. The

It's a privilege to serve the poor, to be servants of noble Africans, but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That's where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.

Sub-Saharan Africa is also home to 400 million of the world's poorest people.

Entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.

But the one thing we can all agree -- all faiths, all ideologies -- is that God is with the vulnerable and poor. God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.

Well, while I hope God is with those of us who live such comfortable lives, I know God is with the poorest and most vulnerable.

Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice; it makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties; it doubts our concern, and it questions our commitment. Six and a half thousand Africans are still dying every day of preventable, treatable disease, for lack of drugs we can buy at any drug store. This is not about charity: This is about Justice and Equality.

The fact is that this generation -- yours, my generation ... we're the first generation that can look at poverty and disease, look across the ocean to Africa and say with a straight face, we can be the first to end this sort of stupid extreme poverty, where in the world of plenty, a child can die for lack of food in it's belly.

Don't believe them when they tell me there ain't no cure. The Rich stay healthy, the Sick stay poor.

He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand but the hand of the diligent maketh rich.

There is that maketh himself rich, yet hath nothing there is that maketh himself poor, yet hath great riches.

In the first place, those who are guilty of such sweeping criticisms do not know how many people would be made poor, and how much suffering would result, if wealthy people were to part all at once with any large proportion of their wealth in a way to disorganize and cripple great business enterprises.

When I first went to Hampton I do not recall that I had ever slept in a bed that had two sheets on it.

Where the wages are smallest and the conditions hardest, there emigration has reached the highest mark. In other words, it is precisely from those parts of Italy where there are the greatest poverty, crime, and ignorance that the largest number of emigrants from Italy go out to America, and, I might add, the smallest number return. Of the 511,935 emigrants who came to North and South America from Italy in 1906, 380,615 came from Sicily and the southern provinces.

looking over the budgets of a number of the small landowners, whose position is much better than that of the average farm labourer, I found that as much as $5 was spent for wine, while the item for meat was only $2 per year. There are thousands of people in Sicily, I learned, who almost never taste meat. The studies which have been made of the subject indicate that the whole population is underfed.

in those first years—and are reminded now—that people would excuse us for our poverty, for our lack of comforts and conveniences, but that they would not excuse us for dirt.

I was of the opinion that a good heart was not money in the bank. You couldn't buy a bowl of rice with sympathy, I used to say. But two baht worth of rice with love at the supper table is a feast, and I know, because we starved on roast pork.

Economy is for the poor; the rich may dispense with it.