Quotes About Poverty

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

A poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature.

A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity. He is known by his knock.

A variant of the NIT puts it within our power to end poverty, provide for comfortable retirement and medical care for everyone, and—as a bonus that is probably more important than any of the immediate effects—revitalize American civil society.

The goal of an end to poverty is so noble that governments have successfully used the end to justify the means. The means have been high taxation of the productive members of society and arrays of bureaucracies that increasingly regulate the lives of us all. 1

At a time when we can split the atom, land on the moon, and decode the human genome, why do 2 billion people live on less than $2 a day?

How much does it cost to treat leprosy? One $3 dose of antibiotic will cure a mild case; a $20 regimen of three antibiotics will cure a more severe case. The World Health Organization even provides the drugs free, but India's health care infrastructure is not good enough to identify the afflicted and get them the medicine they need. So, more than 100,000 people in India are horribly disfigured by a disease that costs $3 to cure. That is what it means to have a per capita GDP of $2,900.

The widest gulf in the world is the distance between getting by, and not getting by.

The reality being that they'd lost the plot somewhere along the way, their once great romance spun into a period piece, into an immigrant family story, and then into a story about two people trying to get by. And it was just that: getting by. Barely, and no more. Because they'd also, in the way old people often do, slipped gently into poverty. Also without anyone noticing.

The only difference between Detroit and the Third World in terms of corruption is Detroit don't have no goats in the streets.

The people in Detroit are poor, but most of them are good. There are things going on here beyond an ordinary person's control. These people are hungry and they have no job. No possibility of a job. They're stuck here.

Children are dying in this city because they're too fucking poor to keep warm. Put that in your fucking notebook. I put it in my fucking notebook.

I was shown mold, leaking pipes, exposed asbestos insulation, broken toilets, cracked floors, malfunctioning heating units, feces bubbling up from the sewer pipes in the basements. I had seen better government buildings in the slums of Tijuana. Neven and the boys from 23 told me it was bad but what I was seeing was worse than the Baghdad fire department, which actually got more than one hundred fifty million dollars from the United States government, while Detroit got zero.

In Detroit, it's so fucking poor that fire is cheaper than a movie. A can of gas is $3.50 and movie is 8 bucks. But there aren't any movie theaters left in Detroit so fuck it. They burn the empty house next door and they sit on the fucking porch with a 40, and they're barbecuing and laughing because it's fucking entertainment.

If we were poets, we'd starve on words.

Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! - I have as much soul as you, - and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you!

Why, European visitors tell us, we don't know what poverty is." "Neither do we," answered Zava. "Won't you tell us?

Mark's story of Jesus stands virtually alone among the literary achievements of antiquity for one reason: it is a narrative for and about the common people. The Gospel reflects the daily realities of disease, poverty, and disenfranchisement that characterized the social existence of first-century Palestine's "other 95%.

You would think that with hunger and poverty and disease to do their part, mankind would not need to look for ways to die. But that's not the case. Hardly; hardly. There is always a new cruelty, a new war. And each time, they deal out death with an enthusiasm that staggers the mind.

I'm scared to death of being poor. It's like a fat girl who loses 500 pounds but is always fat inside. I grew up poor and will always feel poor inside. It's my pet paranoia.

I've been been rich I've been poor Rich is better I've been young I've been old Young is better

I probably wouldn't have been fearless enough to go on such a trip with so little money if I hadn't grown up without it.

There can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity.

It wishes to see only "useful things" produced, but it forgets that production of too many useful things produces too large a useless population.