Quotes About Poverty

Vogt and Borlaug have the same mission: to use the discoveries of modern science to spare Mexico from a future of poverty and environmental degradation. But prospects are unlikely, in Mexico in 1946, for this to happen; indeed, Vogt and Borlaug believe that the situation grows direr by the day.

the essayist Montaigne had noted... [Indigenous North Americans] (clarification by me) who visited France... noticed among us some men gorged to the full with things of every sort while their other halves were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty. They found it strange that these poverty-stricken halves should suffer [that is, tolerate] such injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.

the essayist Montaigne had noted... Indians who visited France... noticed among us some men gorged to the full with things of every sort while their other halves were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty. They found it strange that these poverty-stricken halves should suffer [that is, tolerate] such injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.

They found it strange that these poverty-stricken halves should suffer [that is, tolerate] such injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.

Borlaug seldom replied directly, though the attacks stung. In private, he told friends that most of the criticism was sheer elitism. Somehow rich environmentalists in the West thought the world was better off if people in poor areas didn't improve their lives. He had nothing against organic this or that but it was unrealistic to promote it as a solution to hunger in the world of 10 billion. And it was immoral to stand in the way of feeding hungry people.

I no longer want a monastery which is too secure, I want a small monastery, like the house of a poor workman who is not sure if tomorrow he will find work and bread, who with all his being shares the suffering of the world.

We shall scarcely find in Europe a peasantry whose abject poverty is not in some measure alleviated by this power which literature gives them to live outside it.

An important part of responsibility is to not neglect it. I wonder how often we have neglected the authority Jesus has given us by not applying His power to illness, weather, poverty or other life situations that He expects us, as His agents, to deal with? I wonder how many people Jesus heals directly because we do not participate? Worse yet, how many go unhealed because we who have been commissioned to operate in Jesus' authority and power have neglected our responsibility?

money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.

Families who live in public housing on the South Side of Chicago are not poor because Bill Gates lives in a big house.

Good government makes a market economy possible. Period. And bad government, or no government, dashes capitalism against the rocks, which is one reason that billions of people live in dire poverty around the globe.

The same data can (and should) be interpreted entirely differently if one changes the unit of analysis. We don't care about poor countries; we care about poor people.

The poor of the world may be guilty of this and that particular fault or foolishness, but if we are fair we will admit that nothing they have done or left undone quite explains all the odds we see stacked up against them. We are sometimes tempted to look upon the poor as so many ne'er-do-wells we can simply ignore. But they will return to haunt our peace, because they are greater than their badge of suffering, because they are human.

You know the type—will give herself to the first nobleman in a uniform who comes calling with a couple of eggs and a piece of rat meat." "You're selling yourself short." "I've just sold myself for rat meat," she said, and she turned from him and lit the stove.

I used to think that I knew something about poverty. You have not seen poverty until you've seen it in Africa.

They [Harvard academia] liked the poor, but didn't like the smell of the poor.

U.S. military spending, which consumes half of all discretionary spending, has had a profound social and political cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debt threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick, and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering is the price for victory, which is never finally defined or attainable.

We should feel the same pity for minds that do not eat as for stomachs. If there be anything sadder than a body perishing for want of bread, it is a mind dying of hunger for lack of light."77

The human imagination, as Emma Goldman pointed out, has the power to make ideas felt. Goldman noted that when Andrew Undershaft, a character in George Bernard Shaw's play Major Barbara, says that poverty is "the worst of crimes" and "all the other crimes are virtues beside it," his impassioned declaration elucidates the cruelty of class warfare more effectively than Shaw's socialist tracts.

When it shall be said in any country in the world, 'My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of happiness—when these things can be said," wrote Paine, "then may that country boast of its constitution and its government.

Nearly half of the country is now classified as poor or low-income.

I've always felt like a lot of people's misconceptions of me have to do with how I grew up. I grew up poor, and I grew up rich.

The miser is as much in want of what he has as of what he has not.

It's important to produce economic development. Fundamentalism develops even faster with misery.