Quotes About Poverty

Without the Ermen & Engels mill in Salford, owned by Friedrich Engels's textile-manufacturing father, the chronically impoverished Marx might well have not survived to pen polemics against textile manufacturers. Something

Why people take drugs baffles me to no end. Especially when they can't afford them.

NAUGHTY AND NICE? said Death. BUT IT'S EASY TO BE NICE IF YOU'RE RICH. IS THIS FAIR? Albert wanted to argue. He wanted to say, Really? In that case, how come so many of the rich buggers is bastards? And being poor don't mean being naughty, neither.

They stole from rich merchants and temples and kings. They didn't steal from poor people; this was not because there was anything virtuous about poor people, it was simply because poor people had no money.

Furnishing was not a priority in the Citadel. Shelves, stools, tables... There was a rumor among the novices that priests towards the top of the hierarchy had golden furniture, but there was no sign of it here. The room was as severe as anything in the novices' quarters although it had, perhaps, a more opulent severity; it wasn't the forced bareness of poverty, but the starkness of intent.

There were two ways of looking at the world, but only one when you are starving.

Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?

I was a drunk. You have to be richer than I was to be an alcoholic.

He could hear his granny speaking. "No one's too poor to buy soap." Of course, many people were. But in Cockbill Street they bought soap just the same. The table might not have any food on it but, by gods, it was well scrubbed. That was Cockbill Street, where what you mainly ate was your pride.

We have created a society in which the rich become richer and the poor become poorer, and in which we are so caught up in our own immediate problems that we cannot afford to be aware of what is going on with the rest of the human family or our planet Earth. In my mind I see a group of chickens in a cage disputing over a few seeds of grain, unaware that in a few hours they will all be killed.

What a wretched thing it was to be born poor and not to have any one to do anything for you and not to be able to do so very much for yourself!

Clyde was as vain and proud as he was poor

The Third World War will not be unleashed by the great powers; it will break out first in the zones of famine and oppression.

Poverty should not just be made an issue - there is need to actually work on it.

Christians should emphatically be campaigning for justice for the poor - but the Church is not a campaign.

My mother kept the house clean and we ate good. I didn't know we were poor until I started giving interviews.

There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.

My mother, we were a very poor family. When I was a kid, we would be in our little room, and there would be a knock on the door almost every night with a hobo begging for food. Even though we didn't even have enough to eat, my mother always found something to give them.

What separates developing countries from developed countries is as much a gap in knowledge as a gap in resources.

When I escaped from China and came to Hong Kong, the contrast was that China was like hell and Hong Kong like heaven. Though I was very poor, I smelled the air of freedom and was full of hope for the future. That's the way I thought heaven is.

The cause of homelessness is lack of housing.

Scores of Congolese die each day unnecessarily due to the lack of access to healthcare and modern medicine.

we steal with our eyes closed to the conditions in which the poor, who make our affluence possible, live. We covet what our neighbours have and want more of the same.

Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity. Luxury is the opposite of status. It is the ability to make a living by being oneself. It is the freedom to refuse to live by habit. Luxury is liberty. Luxury is elegance.