Quotes About Poverty

I didn't grow up in the slums or anything that dire, but I know what it is to grow up without having money or being able to support family.

We went bankrupt. My parents got divorced. I was going to a super-rich kids school and suddenly we had to shift to Shivaji Nagar slums. So I have had the experience of both lives.

Many times when we are talking about displacement, we talk about it within the frame of gentrification, which focuses on transitioning neighborhoods. But man, every city I've looked at, Milwaukee included, most evictions are right there, smack dab in ungentrifying, poor, segregated communities.

What we see out there is an affordable housing crisis, particularly in the rental market in cities big and small, and we don't have the resources necessary to fill that gap.

Since the world has existed, there has been injustice. But it is one world, the more so as it becomes smaller, more accessible. There is just no question that there is more obligation that those who have should give to those who have nothing.

The poor North has much to do with slavery. It staggers under its load and smarts under its lash.

The debate that I'm interested in having is with seriously smart people about how we design institutions in the 21st century that will genuinely address problems of poverty and educational underachievement.

I think I grew up with a profound sense of watching people who were good people, who were smart people, who were hardworking people - God, nobody on this Earth worked harder than my mom and dad - and they had very little.

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

I've always found that the poorer the places that I go, the more smiles I see, and the more happiness I see.

From daycare to graduation, our education system stacks the odds against the poor. Predicted grades is just one of many hurdles that are set a little higher for those whose parents do not have the money to smooth their path in life or the inside knowledge of how the system works.

I participate in the SNAP Challenge to raise awareness about the millions of people in our communities who struggle with hunger on a daily basis despite living in the most prosperous nation ever known.

It's certainly possible to live on a SNAP budget, but it's impossible to feed yourself or your family healthy, nutritious food.

We are prophetic interrogators. Why are so many people hungry? Why are so many people and families in our shelters? Why do we have one of six of our children poor, and one of three of these are children of color? 'Why?' is the prophetic question.

It's hard for me to understand how poverty can be invisible to so many people, since I see it everywhere. Readers sometimes think this world is so different; on the one hand, they feel connected to the people I'm writing about, and on the other hand, they're saying their lives are a world away.

Alcohol decimated the working class and so many people.

I certainly didn't grow up ever having to worry about where my next meal was coming from. The fact that so many people, even in our own country, worry about something so basic, it's something I really wanted to help to do something about.

I never knew I was poor until I got older because we just had so much fun. I thought everyone had grilled cheese night and that everyone had Cup-O-Noodles for dinner on Fridays.

Such as are in immediate fear of a losing their estates, of banishment, or of slavery, live in perpetual anguish, and lose all appetite and repose; whereas such as are actually poor, slaves, or exiles, ofttimes live as merrily as other folk.

Our main enemies are held to be death, poverty and pain. Yet everyone knows that death, called the dreadest of all dreadful things, is by others called the only haven from life's torments, our natural sovereign good, the only guarantor of our freedom, the common and ready cure of all our ills;2 some await it trembling and afraid: others [C] bear it more easily than life.3 [B] One man complains that death is too available:4

I once took pleasure some place in seeing men, through piety, take a vow of ignorance, as of chastity, poverty, penitence. It is also castrating our disorderly appetites, to blunt that cupidity that pricks us on to the study of books, and to deprive the soul of that voluptuous complacency which tickles us with the notion of being learned.

Todos nosotros somos a la vez objeto de repugnancia y de envidia. Todos nosotros menos los muy pobres, los que sólo tienen por debajo de ellos el pozo séptico del infierno.

From being the object of a religious experience and sanctified, poverty became the object of a moral conception that condemned

You can have earthly riches, but you can still be poor spiritually.