Quotes About Poverty

'The Talk-Funny Girl' opens with a glum picture of a desperately poor rural New England family. Poverty has so brutalized the family that the ordinary laws and rules governing humanity have eroded, turning systems of behavior upside down.

It seems to me an indictment of the Republican Party that if you talk about issues of poverty and upward mobility, people assume you're a Democrat.

We had a very normal, sort of ghetto, urban upbringing. My father was a bus driver and my mother was a seamstress and a substitute schoolteacher, off and on. So, that all adds up to no money.

Although they are some of the hardest working folks I know, rural Americans earn, on average, $11,000 less than their urban counterparts each year. And they are more likely to live in poverty.

A lot of rappers say 'I'm talking about stuff that goes on, what I grew up in, that I know about.' And these journalists say, 'Yeah, but you're making 80 million dollars, that stuff's not about you.' Look how long he's been making 80 million. He grew up poor in an urban city and the things he's experienced and knows.

New Orleans is just a microcosm of Newark and Detroit and hundreds of other troubled urban locales.

I see myself writing in the tradition of urban ethnography and in the tradition of the sociology of poverty.

There is sometimes a tendency to assume that everyone in this great country has adequate housing. But when you go to certain places, certain neighborhoods, both urban and rural, you find out that's not the case, and I think we have to do much more.

I think the guys who are sort of infantry in Somali piracy are not unlike low-level drug dealers in urban areas in America, who see it as, you know, not having many other options. I think it comes down to money and needing to survive.

We're creating these massive urban areas in the Third World. It's like you take the entire population of California and put it in one city. Then you remove basic sanitation and medical services, and you have a ticking biological time bomb.

We know we cannot achieve our twin goals of ending poverty and boosting shared prosperity without ending poverty and creating equality for women and girls.

My suggestion is that we should first work to ensure the Third World has clean drinking water and sanitation.

The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.

Handouts are not going to end global poverty, but work - real work - just might.

Nothing is more humiliating than to have to beg for work, and a system in which any man has to beg for work stands condemned. No man can defend it.

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.

How I wish everyone had decent work! It is essential for human dignity.

The greatest challenge of the next 50 years, I believe, will be to create dignified work for everyone... not through handouts and charity, but through market forces.

If people can't make ends meet at home with food, benefits, health, and health care in particular, how can they be present, engaged, knowledge workers when they come to work?

I'm very moved to be here today, ... Our lives are now much better, but Vietnam remains a very poor country. We need to work much harder.

For too many, to work means having less income.

Laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes it.

Poverty and the rule of race that is called apartheid drive the Transkeian migrant from security on the land to work in the cities, and then back again.

As a remedy against all ills - poverty, sickness, and melancholy - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work