Quotes About Poverty

You've never been a peasant in medieval France, Harry," Bob said. "Life was hard for those people. Never enough food, shelter, medicine. If you could give yourself a fur coat and the ability to go out and hunt your own meat, you would have jumped at the chance, too.

Combien de fois avons-nous entendu dire que cinq millions d'enfants se couchent tous les soirs en ayant faim ? Sans doute moins souvent que toutes les fois où nous avons lu ou vu des articles où l'on faisait l'éloge de la richesse.

Wealthy Christians talk about the poor but have no friends who are poor. So they merely speculate on the reasons for their condition, often placing the blame on the poor themselves.

A modern American prophet, like Micah, once said, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is a nation approaching spiritual death."3 He was Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and he also made the connection between war and poverty.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

Because of increasingly restrictive standards, many poor working people had been cut off Medicaid. Free clinics provided some medical care, but could not supply needed prescriptions or even such over-the-counter preparations as iron supplements for anemic mothers.

There are more people now, more children, going without health care ... A medical team surveying twenty-five hundred poor children in the District found that eight out of ten had untreated medical or dental problems. The infant mortality rate in the District, already the highest in the nation and higher than that of many Third World nations, actually rose ... and prenatal care was considered an important causative factor. ~Lenore Horowitz, quoted by Jimmy Carter

The excessive punishment of prisoners and the use of the death penalty in the United States, alone in the developed world, have continued to fall most heavily on the poor, mentally ill, and people of color. It was on this subject that I made the best speech of my life.

If wishes were horses, beggers would ride

As a remedy against all ills - poverty sickness and melanchol - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work.

The eligibility for food stamps has widened and widened welfare has been widened - unemployment insurance and disability insurance. These are all incentives not to work.

I got up one Christmas morning and we didn't have nothing to eat. We didn't have an apple, we didn't have an orange, we didn't have a cake, we didn't have nothing.

I work 40 hours a week to be this poor.

We should always be realistic about our needs, steer clear of this over indulgence & self imposed poverty nonsense.

The scientific community having made a rapid ascent from deep poverty to great affluence, from academe's cloisters to Washington's high councils, still tends to be a bit excitable - not unlike a nouveau riche in a fluctuating market.

Never dress down for the poor. They won't respect you for it. They want their First Lady to look like a million dollars.

He is poor indeed that can promise nothing

I did not wish her to go on in this strain because her poverty was something which obsessed her and like all obsessions was boring to other people.

When Noam was a kid and felt picky about choking down gefilte fish on Pesach, his dad sat him down and told him the story of la pobre viejecita. Once upon a time, there was an old lady with nothing to eat but meat, fruit and sweets... and he'd flop another lump of poached fish on Noam's plate and say, "God bless us with the poverty of that poor old woman.

no one asks poor people if they want war.

The American Way of Life! Eat too much, work too much, buy too much, read too little, think even less, and die in poverty and insecurity. No, thank you. Don't you see that's how Americans take over the world? Not just through their army and their CIA and their World Bank., but through this infectious disease called the American Dream?

Why were we hungry? my stomach cried. Even then I understood that if the rich could only spare all the hungry a bowl of rice, they would be less rich but they would not starve. If the solution was so simple, why was anyone hungry? Was it only a lack of sympathy?

No one asks poor people if they want war. Nor had anyone asked these poor people if they wanted to die of thirst and exposure on the coastal sea, or if they wanted to be robbed and raped by their own soldiers.

She was a poor person, I was her poor child, and no one asks poor people if they want war.