Quotes About Poverty

Growing up in a trailer, you think everything you get is good. I always thought it was a gift from God, because some people are out here struggling and on the street. We had warmth. We had clothes. We had a roof over our head.

On the one hand, the rich look askance at our continuing poverty - on the other, they warn us against their own methods.

The poor, and especially poor people of color, don't have the luxury of raising 'free-range' children without risking severe consequences. Parents of color don't receive a visit and a warning if their children are found playing alone; they are immediately blamed and far more likely to be arrested or lose custody of their children.

India made a big mistake by signing up to TRIPS. With a population of 1.3 billion, India can't afford a monopoly in healthcare. Monopolies lead to higher prices and we can't allow them in a country like India with so much poverty and misery. It was like signing our own death warrant.

In my photography, I always lean towards the underprivileged because that's where I came from. When I went to the wars, I attempted to go and stand by those who were being trodden on. By that, I mean people like the Palestinians. When I go to India, I see really the poorest people, and I tend to be drawn to them.

We think of violence as being conflict and fighting and wars and so forth, but the most ongoing horrific measure of violence is in the horrible poverty of the Third World... and the poverty in the United States as well.

The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDs, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of those wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead - everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real.

If the impoverishment and community fragmentation continue, it is not a stretch to predict urban wars sparked by inequality, unemployment, and the breakdown of dialogue between leaders and citizens.

I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.

When I was living out of my car, I did not know where we were going to eat, use the bathroom, rest or enjoy a quiet moment. I used McDonald's bathrooms to mix baby formula and wash my body because I had no other options.

When you grow up with a mother who has to wash dishes and clean hotel rooms, you know the importance of having a job, and you can't be without a job for any length of time, or you will be without anything.

Anyone can see why an elite athlete would want to leave a small, impoverished country where their skills were effectively uncashed winning lottery tickets. All they had to do was wash ashore almost anywhere else in the world and cash in. Yet the vast majority of Cuban boxers - and Cuban athletes in general - despite that incentive, stayed.

I had only one pair of white shoes with a very high heel, and they were terrible. They got terribly dirty, because I had no money and I walked all over Paris by foot. I also only had one black dress, which I had to wash every night.

In one of my secondary schools, the single kindest thing I remember was a teacher who quietly offered to wash the uniform of a friend who was being hounded by children saying he 'stank': his mother was unemployed and couldn't always afford to take his clothes to the launderette.

When Superstorm Sandy churned up fourteen-foot walls of water that slammed New York's coastal communities in October 2012, they also washed away any false notions we had that we care sufficiently for poor people.

Though many of the poor have come to see the affluent middle class as its enemy, that class actually stands between the poor and the real powers in this society - the administrative octopus with its head in Washington, the conglomerates, the military complex.

Beggars, alas, could not be choosers.

I reject 'poor' as the artificial creation of humans. Hunger exists, though, and a hungry creature is entitled to eat.

No Tank Tops, the sign had said at Youth Guidance. Because it was presumed the parents didn't know better than to show up to court looking like hell. The sign might have said Your Poverty Reeks.

When the police came to San Lorenzo they were fired upon by children and grandmothers with rocks, buckets of water, rotten eggs. There was more of the proletarian shopping, as it was called, that I'd seen on the Via del Corso. Jeans for the people. Cheese and bread and wine for the people. Umbrellas for the people, because rain fell and fell that week.

Charles Bukowski's Factotum

before she was lost to the Tenderloin, north of Fascination, up in the boisterous and dirty hotels that formed the pearls on the chain of her bare life, barer even than mine.

I am very poor - for a know nothing, understand nothing. It is not a calamitous condition until it is realized.

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