Quotes About Poverty

If I were to live in Africa, serving the poor, the number-one thing I'd miss wouldn't be running water or electricity - it would be style... being able to get dressed up and feel beautiful.

It was very clear to me in 1965, in Mississippi, that, as a lawyer, I could get people into schools, desegregate the schools, but if they were kicked off the plantations - and if they didn't have food, didn't have jobs, didn't have health care, didn't have the means to exercise those civil rights, we were not going to have success.

Mississippi is akin to an underdeveloped country.

True it is that covetousness is rich, modesty starves.

I lost my mom when I was seven, and at some point in my life having food it was like a big deal for me because it was not every day.

Remember that disadvantage is less about income than environment. The best metrics of child poverty aren't monetary, but rather how often a child is read to or hugged.

No complaint... is more common than that of a scarcity of money.

You lose your individuality a huge amount when you have no money, and I certainly had that experience.

There's so little money in my bank account, my scenic checks show a ghetto.

In Africa, you know, if you're poor, at least you can go to the forest and share some mangoes with the gorillas and monkey.

When I was growing up in Alabama in the '50s, even though we were poor and the laws were against blacks, we still had a sense of morality.

With fewer resources to share around more people, how can the poor have improved lifestyles?

I always like to say, Bill Clinton created more millionaires and billionaires than any president, but you know what, more people moved out of poverty. Middle-class income - all-time high.

I grew up quite poor, and the Mormon church was always there for us as a family.

Our mothers and fathers want change. They worked all of their lives, but today live in destitution.

One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.

Since all countries around the world began poor, what requires an explanation is not why there is poverty but how some countries rose out of poverty to become prosperous.

90 percent of all deaths from malaria in the world occur in sub-Saharan Africa.45

Aunque la palabra «economía» puede traer el término dinero a la mente de muchos, lo cierto es que para el conjunto de la sociedad el dinero no es más que un instrumento artificial que permite que se hagan cosas reales, pues, de lo contrario, el gobierno podría hacernos ricos a todos simplemente imprimiendo más billetes. No es el dinero sino el volumen de bienes y servicios lo que determina si un país es pobre o próspero.

Those who disdain wealth as a worthy goal for an individual or a society seem not to realize that wealth is the only thing that can prevent poverty.

In short, despite the unpromising record of politics as a means of raising a group from poverty to affluence, and despite the dangers of politicizing race, there are built-in incentives for individual political leaders to do just that.

Capital tends to be scarcer and therefore more expensive in poor countries, while labor tends to be more abundant and therefore cheaper. Poor countries tend to save on the most expensive factor, in the same way that rich countries save on a different factor that is more expensive and scarce there, namely labor. In rich countries, it is capital that is more abundant and cheaper, while labor is scarcer and more expensive.

Seeing the poor as one vast homogenous mass, we overlook that saving ten children from a painful death by hunger does make a real difference, all the difference for these children, and that this difference is quite significant even when many other children remain hungry.

For four years he lived in Brooklyn, and four years in Brooklyn are a geologic age -- a single stratum of grey time. They were years of poverty, of desperation, of loneliness unutterable. All about him were the poor, the outcast, the neglected and forsaken people of America, and he was one of them. But life is strong, and year after year it went on around him in all its manifold complexity, rich with its unnoticed and unrecorded little happenings.