Quotes About Poverty

Without an advocate for the poor, without a new state of mind in America, the country lies on the brink of anarchy.

When you look at guys who get recruited, most of the best athletes, they come from poor families. I don't forget. I was a junior looking through my mother's stuff and looked at her bank statement, and we had $30 in the bank.

Merely slogans and statements will not remove poverty.

I had spent many days hungry; had slept on railway stations at times because I did not have money to pay for a hotel room... there were moments when I felt I had compromised my dignity as a human being and as an actor.

National data on evictions aren't collected, although national data on foreclosures are. And so if anyone wants to, kind of, get to know any statistical research about evictions, they have to really dig in the annals of legal records.

You cannot feed the hungry on statistics.

Low socioeconomic status carries with it an enormously increased risk of a broad range of diseases, and this gradient cannot be fully explained by factors such as health-care access.

When you go somewhere like Kenya and you see how the children don't have pencils and pens, and all of these things are considered luxuries, and what a privilege they see education as and how hungry they are to learn, I wanted to give my brother and sister long lectures. That definitely stayed with me.

I was the poorest kid in my school, poorest kid in my town, poorest family. That stayed with me forever.

I do remember the numbers runners, I do remember the poverty and bread lines. Harlem stays with you forever.

I don't want to sound Pollyannish about this. I understand that poverty is never just poverty. It's often this collection of maladies, this compounded adversity. I'm not naive about the problem. But I think that stable, steady housing is one of the surest footholds we could have on the road to financial stability.

You couldn't beg, borrow, or steal a job in 1931, 1932... it was really tough.

I think I probably have the philosophy of a poor man. You know, like maybe I'd steal the pennies off a dead man's eyes.

My father, who was jailed for stealing on more than one occasion, just abandoned his fatherly responsibilities and disappeared. I grew up working from the time I was nine years of age. Money was a big issue everywhere I lived.

Taking responsible steps to reduce poverty is not merely a moral imperative but an economic one.

The greatest gains against poverty in the United States occurred when government was least involved.

King consistently argued that rich Western nations had moral and political responsibilities to redress global poverty, something they would never do without world disarmament.

Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson's estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt's antitrust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century.4

Deleting welfare didn't eliminate poverty itself. We might as well have expected to conquer aging by overturning Social Security.

Debt is the worst poverty.

But knowledge to their eyes her ample pageRich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll;Chill penury repress'd their noble rage,And froze the genial current of the soul.

Too poor for a bribe, and too proud to importune,He had not the method of making a fortune.

[In a state of nature] No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

O God! that bread should be so dear,And flesh and blood so cheap!