Quotes About Poverty

I had someone call me this morning telling me they had somebody who would only work a certain number of hours a week because if they worked too many hours a week then they couldn't get their government assistance. And that person has multiple cell phones, and gets them new every month with new minutes.

Only in self-sacrifice can man live fully as man, Catholic teaching states. Some people sacrifice for an idea, but really, John Paul argues, we give up our lives only for other people—or for God. And that true sacrifice requires love, which in turn requires true human contact. Community bonds make that love real. And so these two popes show us that true inclusion of the poor—by living in community with them—is the only way to carry out our duty to serve the poor.

Christians might return to the foundational book, which as ever is very timely. Jesus preached that it "is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." We should be modest, for "whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.

One class of elementary school students, for example, sent a letter to party authorities asking "for your help, since we are falling down from hunger. We should be learning, but we are too hungry to walk."75

Whereas previously men were differentiated only by their culture, the community is all of sudden split into economically determined classes and, with the cheap products of the factory, a poverty without beauty invades the homes; ugly, senseless, and comfortless poverty is the most widespread of all modern achievements.

The worst kind of shame is being ashamed of frugality or poverty.

Great material progress has not been matched by great spiritual progress. Quite the opposite. Indeed, from this point of view perhaps man has never been so poor as since he became so rich. Letters against the war: Letter from the Himalayas, 2008.

Why did I practically flee from home when I was fifteen, to go and wash dishes all over Europe? Why, when I arrived in Asia, did I feel so much at home that I stayed there. The wish to get as far away as possible from the poverty-stricken world of my childhood? Perhaps.

A happiness that comes attached to an if or something else is sadness in disguise, choose to be happy and you will be happy whether poor or rich, small or big.

Minimum wages tends to elicit minimum attention.

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

Being poor is a little like having an earache over a Bank Holiday. All you can think about is the pain and how long it will be before a healing hand can be found to take away the anguish.

Of course, for a lot of people, death was a welcome change. Grinding poverty takes the edge off most things, including life.

Poverty can curdle the libido and corrode civilized thoughts. One's sense of humour vanishes, to be replaced by a curry-spoiling sarcasm as one's Mr Hyde emerges from the swamp of the subconscious.

Only through the perception of the indissoluble unity of the two faces of being in creation, the poverty of the soul of humanity and of the world, can we perceive the beauty and the animation and the personification of the things of the world. It is only by the continual perception of this beauty-in-poverty that our certainties, our graspings, our hardnesses of heart can be perpetually undone.

The next time you say 'Life isn't fair' remember that 40% of the world lives on less than $2/day and does not eat every day. How does your 'not fair' compare to theirs? - Tom Cunningham

Jesus didn't come to earth and identify with the rich, the successful, and the most influential. He entered the world as a pauper. He entered the world not in the comfort of his parents' home, nor in the company of smiling relatives or even the safety of a hospital. He arrived in the humbles of places, in the lowliest of circumstances. God hid the mystery of the kingdom in the lives of the most needy.

It occurred to me that a food drive would be a natural way to talk to kids about hunger, which so many of them simply aren't aware of.

Our focus is on helping people develop the skills to find and keep a job. Instead of focusing on a war against poverty, we will focus on fighting for the poor among us by offering them hope and opportunity.

Science offers the chance to cure debilitating and once-intractable disorders like hemophilia and sickle cell disease. But we need to make sure the ability to access these therapies, or the risk that someone can be locked out of them, doesn't widen gaps between the rich and poor.

We're poor black kids from Akron, Ohio. When you tell stories about people like us, sometimes it's going to be considered a social-impact story.

I was a Depression kid, growing up in Oklahoma.

There are lots of different people who use food banks - from young parents to older people.

Until I was 16 or 17, we had no water. My mother had to cook water in a kettle, and once a week I was bathed, and that was it.