Quotes About Poverty

Poverty of relationship can disrupt normal development, influence how the brain works, put you at risk for physical and mental health problems. It's absolutely not good for you. Oprah: Especially for children.

The team discovered that immune functions in poorer kids had more active inflammatory genes and, simultaneously, expressed more sluggishness in gene networks that control the inflammation response than well-to-do children. The health histories of the poor kids also showed more asthma attacks and other health problems.

Poor black neighborhoods, in which poverty and its demographic correlates are highly concentrated, also lack the web of social networks that can supervise children after school, watch the street, and quickly seek help if it's needed. Several statistical studies have found close links between violent crime and economic and racial inequality. Usually examining cities or states, these studies

The opposite of poverty is not wealth. … In too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.

We have a system of justice in [the US] that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.

Poverty is about relationships that don't work, that isolate, that abandon or devalue. Transformation must be about restoring relationships, just and right relationships with God, with self, with community, with the "other," and with the environment.

One of the best gifts that we have for the poor and the non-poor is the living word of God. We need to share it with them and let the living word speak for itself.

Both the poor and the non-poor need to recover their true identity and their true vocation. Everyone is poor in God's world, and everyone is in need of transformation.

The poor are poor largely because they live in networks of relationships that do not work for their well-being. Their relationships with others are often oppressive and disempowering as a result of the non-poor "playing god" in the lives of the poor.

Success, just like poverty is a state of mind. You can become successful instantly with a simple decision and commitment. Long lasting and pronounced success comes to those who renew their commitment to a mindset of abundance every minute, hour and day.

There is no wealth like knowledge, and no poverty like ignorance.

The poorest being that crawls the earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man.

Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.

that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

En este mundo, compañeros, el Pecado, si paga el viaje, puede ir libremente, y sin pasaporte, mientras que la Virtud, si es pobre, es detenida en todas las fronteras.

The business of wretches is wretched even in guarantee giving.

I've seen her kind so many times in town on Saturdays coming in to buy what they can with what they have left over from their husband's drinking. Old before their time, stooped and bent from overwork. Wasting their youth. Sitting around ... waiting for some old man to change, that probably couldn't change if he wanted to, until they have a house full of kids, and at forty look like old women.

When reporting on epidemic diseases that primarily struck the poor in Upper Silesia in 1848, the famed German pathologist Rudolf Virchow observed: "it is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation, that it forgets the most shameful happenings in the daily shame of events."82 The toleration of horrible situations that affect only the health of others is a phenomenon, sadly, that is still very much with us.

I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don't want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: "The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is.

You call this progress, because you have motor cars and telephones and flying machines and a thousand potions to make you smell better? And people sleeping on the streets?

The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is.

The laws that took the vote away from blacks—poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications—also often ensured that poor whites would not vote. And the political leaders of the South knew this.

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions—poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed—which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.

I lay back on my bunk and thought about people I love, and how lucky I was to be white and not poor and just passing briefly through a system which is a permanent hell for so many.