Quotes About Poverty

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor; and if one is a member of a captive population, economically speaking, one's feet have simply been placed on the treadmill forever.

This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.

The poor are always crossing the Sahara. And the lawyers and bondsmen and all that crowd circle around the poor, exactly like vultures. Of course, they're not any richer than the poor, really, that's why they've turned into vultures, scavengers, indecent garbage men, and I'm talking about the black cats, too, who, in so many ways, are worse.

Whereas Jesus and his disciples were distrusted by the state largely because they respected the poor and shared everything, the fundamentalists of the present hour would appear not to know that the poor exist.

And her mother still struggled in these white kitchens in town, humming sweet hymns, tiny, mild eyed and bent, her father still labored on the oyster boats; after a lifetime of labor, should they drop dead tomorrow, there would not be a penny for their burial clothes.

Any society inevitably produces its criminals, but a society at once rigid and unstable can do nothing whatever to alleviate the poverty of its lowest members, cannot present to the hypothetical young man at the crucial moment that so-well-advertised right path.

The poor boy sounded as though he would have put his head in the gas oven. If he had had a gas oven.

On the morning of the evening that we met I had been turned out of my room. I did not owe an awful lot of money, only around six thousand francs, but Parisian hotel-keepers have a way of smelling poverty and then they do what anybody does who is aware of a bad smell; they throw whatever stinks outside.

Urban Renewal' [...] means Negro removal.

in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life.

Slums were the first foothold of poor migrants to the city.

They're devils who pretend to serve the Church and Christ, but they serve only themselves. They lust for power, power at any cost. They hide behind a net of poverty and piousness, but underneath, they feed like kings and amass fortunes.

My mother emigrated from Russia as a young child. She couldn't speak English and had no education. Her father died at age 32, leaving the family destitute. An uncle, who worked as a carpenter, supported the family.

I have seen poverty first hand. My parents were not well-off. They were in Ban'gladesh and I - just a child then - was sent off to live in my uncle's house in Calcutta.

The difference between blues, jazz, rock n' roll and rap is that rap stayed poor. Even the white rappers are poor. It's scarier to look at poor people; it makes everyone uncomfortable. Their pain is something that people would like to see swept under the rug.

My record label always says you shouldn't talk about money because it makes people extremely uncomfortable. Refugees can't talk about money. Rappers can talk about money; refugees can't talk about money.

At one stage, I didn't have any money, so I slept on the streets for a few nights. It wasn't uncommon in the 1950s, and it wasn't uncommon to be out of money. There wasn't anywhere to go to get money.

We learned that kicking down doors to free children from carpet factories isn't enough to stop child labour - we had to tackle the underlying poverty in which their families lived, through education.

The fight against Ebola cannot undermine the fight against poverty.

We decided in the mid-1960s that all poor people are the same: they are all poor. We know they're poor because we have defined a poverty line, and they're all underneath it.

The underprivileged are the only privileged ones in the eyes of Allah.

We were an underprivileged family. My parents were both tailors. We got by. But we only had a few important things in our life.

The people who depend on an antenna are often those who are underprivileged - the elderly and the disadvantaged who can't afford a $200-a-month cable bill.

There has long been a debate in the aid community and in Africa about how to most effectively help situations of poverty in developing nations and underprivileged communities.