Quotes About Poverty

The invention of council housing originally offered the poor a way of knowing they were valuable. You had security of tenure.

Manufacturing value chains are global. Many U.S.-made goods have foreign components. Slapping on tariffs will raise prices and slow imports, but it will make us poorer and impede growth.

We went through substantial periods of being dependent on some type of government service, whether food stamps, WIC, Medicaid, children's health insurance. And I had an acute awareness as a child of what happens when people go without access to health care. I also had an acute awareness that people's lives were not valued the same.

Despite their poverty, their tragic pasts, their own sorrows, they stood before her in strength and spoke with a wisdom that defied their circumstances.

My best friends in the Third World, with families of 4 to 8 children, lament that they have heard of the benign forms of contraception widespread in the First World, and they want those measures desperately for themselves, but they can't afford or obtain them, due in part to the refusal of the U.S. government to fund family planning in its foreign aid programs.

There's a saying in Haiti: A rich man travels, a poor man leaves.

It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, or a rich country inhabited by starving people... Who indeed could afford to ignore science today? At every turn we have to seek its aid... The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.

It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.

A child who dies from hunger is a murdered child.

Périodiquement, le FMI accorde aux pays surendettés un moratoire temporaire ou un refinancement de leur dette. À condition que le pays surendetté se soumette au plan dit d'ajustement structurel. Tous ces plans comportent la réduction, dans les budgets des pays concernés, des dépenses de santé et de scolarité, et la suppression des subventions aux aliments de base et de l'aide aux familles nécessiteuses.

Why was money worth everything when you had none of it, and nothing when you had too much?

When I was born, my mother dressed me as a boy because she could not afford to feed any more daughters. By the mystic laws of gender and economics, it ruins a peasant to place half a bowl of figs in front of his daughter, while his son may gorge on the whole tree, burn it for firewood and piss on the stump, and still be reckoned a blessing to his father.

Are you like all other men after all? The poor should have no justice, just as they have no food, no decent shelter, no regular livelihood? Is that how your saviour Jesus treated the poor?

We must powder our wigs; that is why so many poor people have no bread.

Being wealthy isn't just a question of having lots of money. It's a question of what we want. Wealth isn't an absolute, it's relative to desire. Every time we seek something that we can't afford, we can be counted as poor, how much money we may actually have.

When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.

Résumons en quatre mots le pacte social des deux états. Vous avez besoin de moi, car je suis riche et vous êtes pauvre ; faisons donc un accord entre nous : je permettrai que vous ayez l'honneur de me servir, à condition que vous me donnerez le peu qui vous reste pour la peine que je prendrai de vous commander.

Dans tout pays qui se dépeuple, l'état tend à sa ruine ; et le pays qui peuple le plus, fût-il le plus pauvre, est infailliblement le mieux gouverné.

Since nothing is less stable among men than those external relationships which chance brings about more often than wisdom, and which are called weakness or power, wealth or poverty, human establishments appear at first glance to be based on piles of shifting sand.

Emerging society gave way to the most horrible state of war; since the human race, vilified and desolated, was no longer able to retrace its steps or give up the unfortunate acquisitions it had made, and since it labored only toward its shame by abusing the faculties that honor it, it brought itself to the brink of its ruin. Horrified by the newness of the ill, both the poor man and the rich man hope to flee from wealth, hating what they once had prayed for.

Les hommes ne sont naturellement ni rois, ni grands, ni courtisans, ni riches ; tous sont nés nus et pauvres, tous sujets aux misères de la vie, aux chagrins, aux maux, aux besoins, aux douleurs de toute espèce ; enfin, tous sont condamnés à la mort. Voilà ce qui est vraiment de l'homme ; voilà de quoi nul mortel n'est exempt. Commencez donc par étudier de la nature humaine ce qui en est le plus inséparable, ce qui constitue le mieux l'humanité.

Dad dinero, y pronto tendréis cadenas