Quotes About Poverty

I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story.

Oprah is definitely a self-made woman and she came from being dirt poor, as did I.

If machines do everything well, including allocating capital and resources efficiently, can that be deflationary, can that eliminate poverty? I don't know. It's hard to be very optimistic if you look at how humans have behaved historically.

When you're following people after their eviction, they often start out kind of optimistic, in a way - it's a really tough time, but it's also like a new start. Who knows where they might end up?

To ask a country with 750 million people living on less than a dollar a day to optimize their development for the environment as opposed to getting food in the mouths of these people and giving them a decent lifestyle, that's just a little bit too much to ask.

North Koreans are forced to work at state jobs in a moribund economy. Countless parents watch their children go to bed hungry. Many North Korean families feel they have no option but to try to escape.

Anybody who lives in Colombia knows that if you don't have any money - I tell you what - you don't have many options.

What makes community organizing especially attractive is the faith it places in the ability of the poor to make decisions for themselves.

Growing up in New Orleans and just being in a poverty-stricken neighborhood gave me that same fire that Eazy had to separate himself from what could have ended up being such a bad situation.

We always keep saying, 'We're the best, we're the best.' Other countries offer healthcare for their people. We don't, so how are we the best there? We've got poverty all over the place, and it's the haves and the have-nots, so how are we the best there?

I think Liberty students ought to date a lot without commitment in mind. If you're thinking commitment - and you probably shouldn't until you're a senior - you don't want to start your marriage off under the constraints of poverty and schooling.

Improving Africa's farming sector would have multiple positive outcomes for African people.

I believe that modern slavery is the most outrageous assault on the rights of an individual. It is something that touches me deeply because I grew up in rural Brazil and could see first-hand how poverty forced people to work in harsh, exploitative conditions.

This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.

When I was a kid, I couldn't see life outside ramen noodles and Kool-Aid.

You see one eviction, and you're overcome, but then there's another one and another one and another one.

I've many times been paid far less than what I should have because being raised very poor, I had a mentality that I was just grateful to be there. I had to overcome that type of thinking.

You can't wish away poverty overnight.

When I was in Philadelphia during the Depression in 1930 or '31, I got a very sad job as a night watchman in a garage. The cars in the garage had been abandoned by their owners, since they had lost their jobs and couldn't keep up the payments.

We are leading as thorough a study of 'alienation's positive pole' as of its negative pole. As a consequence of our diagnosis of the poverty of wealth, we are able to establish the world map of the extreme wealth of poverty. These speaking maps of a new topography will be in fact the first realization of 'human geography.' On them we will replace oil-deposits with the contours of layers of untapped pedestrian consciousness.

Illness and death are not the only consequences of the lack of access to water; it also hinders education and economic development. Widespread illness makes countries less productive, more dependent on outside aid, and less able to lift themselves out of poverty. According to the United Nations, one of the main reasons girls do not go to school in sub-Saharan Africa is that they have to spend so much time fetching water from distant wells and carrying it home.

Charity should be given to those who need it not those who want it.

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.

Jesus never says to the poor: 'come find the church', but he says to those of us in the church: 'go into the world and find the poor, hungry, homeless, imprisoned.