Quotes About Poverty

their jaws grow large, and their lips grow coarse, like the poor Paddies who eat potatoes.

But as John Steinbeck had said long ago, we had come to fear a man with a hole in his shoe.

There is no equal to poor white trash when they get their hands on a Bible.

If you're poor and you commit a crime, the legal system works quickly and leaves you in pieces all over the highway. If you're educated and have money, the process becomes a drawn-out affair, like a terminal cancer patient who can afford various kinds of treatment all over the world. But eventually he ends up at Lourdes.

Nova Scotia in 1755 fell into decline and became associated with ignorance and failure and poverty. The fisher-people of southern Louisiana became ashamed of who they were.

the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man's dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country.

Reb was a cheerful soul, a man of boundless enthusiasm, who believed the Talmud empowered him with the gift of making everyone around him happy and comfortable, including Negroes, whom he saw as fellow immigrants who, like him, were forced by poverty and lack of resources to learn many skills and continually adjust.

He had gotten a new set of clothes someplace, but they were only worse new versions of the same thing he wore before: black trousers, black vest, frock coat, stiff collar, withered, crumpled, and chewed at the edges. His boots was worse than ever, crumpled like pieces of text paper, curled at the toes. In other words, he looked normal, like his clothes was dying of thirst, and he himself was about to keel over out of plain ugliness.

Still, I could not imagine how being poor could be worse than being rich and hating yourself. I had seen enough of what it was like to be dead. It was time to try living.

Did I want a dog? No. Did I need a dog? Also no. We were six kids running for our lives, not knowing where our next meal was coming from. Could we afford to feed a dog? Wait for it—no.

I should say many things. Mexico has been one of the losers of the 20th century. We tried many different alternatives to development and unfortunately we have 40 percent of the population poor; we have a per capita income that is extremely low.

Unfortunately, Haiti does not have many safe environments for children to play and express themselves.

When we came to this country, unfortunately, my father lost his job, and we were this close to destitution. We were put on food stamps. We were put in public housing.

The strongest predictor of unhappiness is anyone who has had a mental illness in the last 10 years. It is an even stronger predictor of unhappiness than poverty - which also ranks highly.

Inequality doesn't create unhappiness.

And, in fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources, material resources, contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources do not increase happiness.

Success has got nothing to do with being happy. I've been very rich, and been unhappy, and I've been very poor, and been happy.

Inequality makes everyone unhappy, the poor most of all, and that is well within the remit of the state. More money gives less extra happiness the richer we get, yet we are addicted to earning and spending more every year.

We were living together in the projects, with two other musicians in Munich. We had nothing to eat, and we were unhappy. We wanted to be stars. And suddenly this guy gave us a chance, and we took it.

Our neighborhood had more than its share of challenges, from poverty to crime to unhealthy air. It may not have been the safest neighborhood, but my mom felt blessed that we had the sanctuary of a backyard. And we had a strong sense of community.

Slums could be thought of as the development of a special organ, or they could be thought of as a tumor that's grown, and in some ways is unhealthy and could ultimately lead to the city's destruction. My own feeling is that slums are probably a bit of both.

I was born in Somalia, which is in East Africa. My parents started with nothing: poor, poor, poor. They eloped, which was unheard of in my country, when my father was 17 and my mother was 14.

Of those who die from avoidable, poverty-related causes, nearly 10 million, according to UNICEF, are children under five. They die from diseases such as measles, diarrhea, and malaria that are easy and inexpensive to treat or prevent.

My parents divorced, my brothers and I ended up living with my mother, and we were living with the choice of heating or eating. My mum was working, but she needed financial support to make ends meet. I had to have free school dinners and free school uniforms.