Quotes About Poverty

For avarice begins where poverty ends.

Poverty has in its favour an exquisite sleep filled with beautiful dreams.

Ah! Comme une existence peut devenir orageuse entre les quatre murs d'une mansarde! L'ame umaine est une fée, elle métamorphose une paille en diamants; sous sa bageutte les palais anchantés éclosent comme les fleurs des champs sous les chauds inspirations du soleil.

Pourquoi deux mois de prison au dandy qui, dans une nuit, ôte à un enfant la moitié de sa fortune, et pourquoi le bagne au pauvre diable qui vole un billet de mille francs avec les circonstances aggravantes ? Voilà vos lois. Il

This poor young man had felt there the gnawing of that burning poverty which is a sort of crucible from which great talents are to emerge as pure and incorruptible as diamonds, which may be subjected to any shock without being crushed. In the fierce fire of their unbridled passions they acquire the most impeccable honesty, and get into the habit of fighting the battles which await genius with the constant work by which they coerce their cheated appetites.

I'm so sorry to do this to you," she whispered tenderly. "I'm so sorry we are too poor to buy you a toy car.

But despite our poverty, our parents always taught us to have dignity, honesty and pride. Never to steal or do things that would harm others. Our good family name was most sacred and should be protected with all our might.

Poverty ... is already half-Christian by its very nature; it has everything to gain by a doctrine which makes so little of the present and the visible, and so much of the future and the unseen.

If you feed them, if you feed the children, three square meals a day during the school year, how can you expect them to feed themselves in the summer? Wanton little waifs and serfs dependent on the State. Pure and simple.

Jeremy Bentham argued that 'even in the best of times the great mass of citizens will most probably possess few resources other than their daily labour and, consequently, be always near indigence'. As long as working man was near indigence, hunger would remain an effective tool to goad him to labour. Bentham argued that an important task of government was to ensure conditions of deprivation, thereby guaranteeing that hunger would [be a constant motivation to work].

If you really care about these issues and want to make a difference, you must not use race as a proxy for poverty or poverty as a proxy for race. They intersect and overlap, but to really understand the health of this country, you have to be more sophisticated than assuming that only poor Blacks are affected by this crisis. Look deeper, think differently.

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.

We are precarious. Which is to say some good things (accumulation of diverse knowledges, skills and abilities through work and life experiences in permanent construction), and a lot of bad ones (vulnerability, insecurity, poverty, social exposure).

Money was worthless, which meant putting food on the table required exhausting, hard work.

It's the money thing,' he said after a short, murky moment of post-coital silence. 'It's … I'm not used to this. I'm not used to being poor. I'm not used to having to take money from the woman I love. I'm just … I'm emasculated, Rachel. I'm fucking emasculated.

She had imagined her to be bohemian, arty, shabby chic. But this school did not speak of bohemia or shabby chic, it spoke of poverty, and for the first time it occurred to Rachel that maybe Lucy was poor.

There is no peace in poverty

Growing up in a very rural and remote area in Colorado's San Luis Valley - one of the poorest counties in the United States - essentially created the framework of values from which I operate. I stand up for the little guy. I fight discrimination at all levels. I fight for an inclusive America.

Rather than dividing the world between good and evil, the Left divided the world in terms of economics. Economic classes, not moral values, explained human behavior. Therefore, to cite a common example, poverty, not one's moral value system, or lack of it, caused crime.

Left-wing politicians take away your liberty in the name of children and of fighting poverty, while right-wing politicians do it in the name of family values and fighting drugs. Either way, government gets bigger and you become less free.

Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.

The first thing we should acknowledge is that poverty is hugely expensive. It varies from country to country, but most of the time it's around 3, 4 or 5% of GDP. If you look at what it would cost just to top up the income of all the poor people in a country, it would cost about 1% of GDP.

Meat supplies a variety of nutrients - among them iron, zinc, and Vitamin B12 - that are not readily found in plants. We can survive without it; millions of vegetarians choose to do so, and billions of others have that choice imposed upon them by poverty.

Before this learning experience, I had assumed that with regard to programs that sought to help people out of poverty, the political world was essentially divided into two camps: conservatives who opposed these for a variety of reasons, and liberals who supported them.