Quotes About Poverty

So long as the millions live in hunger and ignorance, I hold every person a traitor who, having been educated at their expense, pays not the least heed to them!

Maybe poverty is a special case of something else. That something else is 'scarcity,' and anyone who has the experience of 'having very little' experiences the same psychology.

We sometime didn't get enough to buy oats for our horses. Most banks had very little money in them.

Sometimes poverty is the greatest gift you can ever be given. Sometimes loss is the key that leads you to gain.

Sometimes, poor people don't smell too good, so love can have no nose.

When you have your own people fleeing their homes it's not because they found a job somewhere else... then you have something to fix in your country.

Because I'm in the media quite a lot now, everyone assumes that everything is fine. People forget I sleep on a mattress on the floor with my son in a house I share with five other people.

Growing up in Orangeburg, I didn't know that I lived in the 'corridor of shame.' I was the son of a single mom who learned to read from comic books. My grandparents helped raise me.

There are no bridges in folk songs because the peasants died building them.

Soon we saw that money going to women brought much more benefit to the family than money going to the men. So we changed our policy and gave a high priority to women. As a result, now 96% of our four million borrowers in Grameen Bank are women.

Many people don't think that the poor in the developing world can do work on a computer. They won't say it explicitly. But they think it's too sophisticated.

We have mistaken the nature of poverty, and thought it was economic poverty. No, it is poverty of soul, deprivation of God's recreating, loving peace.

In New Orleans, where I'm from, the average household income, with two working parents, two kids, a dog and a little fence is $16,000 a year, so $15,000 for a movie sounds pretty good.

I live in Manhattan, and on my block there's a church with a soup line every day. There are a lot of children there.

It's a Cyprus of misery and soup kitchens and a state which cannot meet basic obligations. It can only cause me grief.

If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.

North as well as South, the Negroes have emerged from slavery into a serfdom of poverty and restricted rights.

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a very poor family. From Sicilian origin, I was the first person in my family to complete high school, let alone go to college.

There are many people in South Africa who are rich and who can share those riches with those not so fortunate who have not been able to conquer poverty.

The poorest country in South America, Bolivia, had been devastated by neoliberal economic policies.

In 2020, no child should go hungry, and yet, in South Carolina 1-in-5 children do.

When I was growing up in South Korea in the '70s and early '80s, the country was too poor to buy original records. Everything was bootlegged.

My parents were laborers so we lived on South Park, which was a low-income region of Seattle. You had a choice - you either joined or formed a gang or you let others bully you.