Quotes About Poverty

I am not as ingenious as these people. No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless.

I don't see anything ingenious about poverty like this. I don't see anything ingenious about having ten children when you can't afford one." Fern put his glasses back on and smiled at me sadly. "Children can be a kind of wealth," he said.

She was motivated by something else: impatience. To Aimee poverty was one of the world's sloppy errors, one among many, which might be easily corrected if only people would bring to the problem the focus she brought to everything.

People are not poor because they've made bad choices, my mother liked to say, they make bad choices because they're poor.

Poverty is not just a headline, my love, it's a lived reality, on the ground—and education is at the heart of it." "I

No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless.

It was the usual story of penniless young men, who think themselves obliged by their birth to choose a liberal profession and bury themselves in a sort of vain mediocrity, happy even when they escape starvation, notwithstanding their numerous degrees.

There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes.

People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.

Perhaps it is natural for the god of the poor to be akin to the god of the dead, for there is something about poverty that smells of death

They came in wagons [...] People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.

There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes. This

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

Child poverty is more than an abstract problem to me. It's something I know all too much about.

You need money to have advocacy in America. People that don't have money don't have advocacy.

Where I came from, people couldn't afford to go to the theatre.

If people were able to afford to eat nutritious food, I think they would make better choices.

Africans don't just need more jobs: they need better jobs.

Growing up without much money made me more ambitious.

I was ashamed of it, of the poverty I came from.

In short, there is no illusory grace left to the poverty that reigns here; it is dire, parsimonious, concentrated, threadbare poverty; as yet it has not sunk into the mire, it is only splashed by it, and though not in rags as yet, its clothing is ready to drop to pieces.

N'est-il pas dans la noble destinée de la femme d'être plus touchée des pompes de la misère que des splendeurs de la fortune ?

At the same time the wretched rooms rose before him, denuded of the poetry of love which beautifies everything; he saw them dirty and faded, regarding them as emblematic of an inner life devoid of honor, idle and vicious. Are not our feelings written, as it were, on the things about us?

The great lawyer, the clear-sighted criminal judge, whose superiority seemed to his colleagues a form of aberration, had for five years been watching legal results without seeing their causes. As he scrambled up into the lofts, as he saw the poverty, as he studied the desperate necessities which gradually bring the poor to criminal acts, as he estimated their long struggles, compassion filled his soul.