Quotes About Poverty

Black, poor, without a father most of my life, one of 10 children - it was actually pretty amazing I had made it to the age of 29 without a noose around my neck.

I grew up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood, but I didn't really know I was a deprived, poverty-stricken child until the media made me aware of it.

I don't know if I hadn't grown up poor, and in the neighborhood I did, if I would have had that much to bring to my art form. I call upon my past with characters.

When I grew up, I lived in a neighborhood that had social clubs. It's never delightful to glamorize one's youth. My neighborhood was poor. But people felt part of the neighborhood. This was in Rockaway Beach, Long Island.

The face of the eviction epidemic is moms and kids, especially poor moms from predominantly Latino and African American neighborhoods.

My brother and I laughed a lot as kids. We came up in the middle of the Depression, and neither one of us knew we were poor. We had nothing, but we didn't know it.

Of course we have compassion. We just don't believe the safety net should be used as a hammock.

I care for the poor. I am the one willing to work with the poor and have a safety net we can all depend on and make people understand that nothing in life is free. You have to get back to society.

Since 1980, Republican shredding of the social safety net has disproportionately hit women, particularly women of colour.

I'm a capitalist. I believe in capitalism. But capitalism only works if you have safety nets to deal with people who are naturally left behind and brutalized by it.

Safety nets for the poor and disadvantaged are a must for any compassionate nation, but encouraging folks to go on the dole when not absolutely necessary is disgraceful.

I definitely relate to any kid who has lived without running water or electricity or having to be the smelly kid going to school because you don't have the resources. It's hard. I really relate to them and I want to help them as much as possible. It's a unique situation that you'll never forget where you came from.

I was raised poor, in a tenement building in Union City, New Jersey, the son of Cuban immigrants.

There's a lot of children that go to bed every night hungry in New York City, and it's shameful. That's really disturbing to me.

I had a friend at college who took being poor very personally. He started showering in the sports centre next door and said he wasn't going to pay for the hot water in our flat any more because he didn't use it. He made me and my other friend pay the bills on our own.

I come from a family where some nights you don't know where food's going to come from. There's nights where you're going to have go to bed hungry.

I had been very focused on the issue of education disparities in our country, and literally, by the time kids are just nine years old, in low-income communities, they're already three or four grade levels behind nine-year-olds in high-income communities.

We have no chance to comprehend what goes on there - it's so dramatic, and people are so poor. We all felt bad about being there. Filming in India felt like we were going to borrow something knowing that we were never going to give it back.

People complain about the rich-and-poor divide. It's crazy, no doubt about it. But what gets me is that today, a billionaire or head of state on their smartphone has the same direct access to information as a homeless person has on a smartphone - or a person in Bangladesh or Papua New Guinea.

When people see what I have now, they have no idea of where I came from and how I didn't have anything growing up.

I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit.

Both suspect the white poor. The right regard them as scroungers, who steal the money of the middle classes, either by breaking into their homes or by taking their taxes in benefit cheques. The left regard them as sexist and racist homophobes.

She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity.

Death had always stalked the explorers, but in an age that held life cheap the risk had been worth the reward. Men who lived in hope of heaven and fear of hell had been eager to serve as Crusaders; men born into poverty had hungered to touch the wealth of the East. Yet the wealth had stuck to the fingers of the elite, and faith had proved a poor defense against disease, famine, and storms.