Quotes About Poverty

What sticks with me more than even that act of kindness was how my mother talked to me about it... So I asked my mother why we gave those families gifts at Christmas when we ourselves didn't have much. I remember then answering for myself: "It was because we felt sorry for them, right?" "We do not feel sorry for them," my mother said sternly, "We understand how they feel.

In the beginning, there were farmers and animal husbanders. Life was hard, brutal, and short. Taxes and other requirements imposed by chiefs, landlords, or the state were onerous. Many people were serfs or slaves, devoid of autonomy and dignity. Poverty and injustice were the norm, save for the lucky few.

Field experiments to date have shown that microfinance—the provision of small loans, typically to women or groups of women—is not particularly effective in reducing poverty.14

Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even.

The need for more makes many people unhappy because it can never be fully satisfied. Interestingly, a recent study about some very poor nations found that those citizens experienced happiness by being connected to their community and family and spending time in nature.

Lo característico de la vida actual no son la inseguridad y la crueldad, sino el desasosiego y la pobreza. George Orwell

Below an income of … $60,000 a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. … Money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.

People who are poor think like traders, but the dynamics are quite different. Unlike traders, the poor are not indifferent to the differences between gaining and giving up. Their problem is that all their choices are between losses. Money that is spent on one good is the loss of another good that could have been purchased instead. For the poor, costs are losses.

Poverty should not be viewed by us as a humiliation and even less so as a position of honour or a fatality.

The viewing centre was a place you go to watch football in Nigeria but you have to pay to watch football at a viewing centre, so if you don't have the means or the money to pay, you can't watch.

The issue of the environment as seen by Pope Francis is not a matter of purely scientific or, indeed, theological debate: it involves economic and political views on how the world's poor can be brought out of poverty while protecting the environment.

We all would like to see a brighter future for Haiti, and I hope this conference will serve to explore many views. Respect for human rights, freedom, and the rule of law must be established in the poorest nation in our hemisphere.

Red Hook, Brooklyn, is a spit of land jutting out over the New York Harbor and looking across to the gleaming high rises of the financial district in Manhattan. Its views are amazing, its poverty stark.

India allows you the luxury of a million inequalities. You can be a schoolboy selling tea to passengers sitting in a state transport bus, but you are royalty when compared to a shirtless, barefoot village boy, from what was traditionally considered an untouchable caste, living on snails and small fish - and sometimes rats.

Like so many poor Ilokanos, my grandparents left their village, for it could no longer sustain them. The Ilocos is a narrow coastal plain where, so often, the mountain drops to the sea. Land hunger had always afflicted the Ilokanos and made them migratory.

I grew up in a mud house, in a small village.

I was born in India, and we came from a poor family and lived in a rural village. My dad came over to Canada as a refugee, and years later, we were able to join him.

We lived in a farm village, and no one could afford to buy a car or to fly. We were envious. We couldn't afford any toys. I couldn't imagine making a real car.

Some of the parts of Burma, we met people who'd never, ever gone out of their village. And they were brutally poor; incredibly poor. And yet they enjoy their lives.

My father grew up quite poor actually in a small farming village in South India. His grandfather was a farmer, his father was a farmer, and he was expected to be a farmer as well - his life took a different path.

I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they need even more help than the people in Athens.

When I was 5 years old, we had nothing in the village. One day, in front of my house, some soldiers in a big Cadillac started to do a picnic. I looked at them like they were coming from the moon. I remember they gave me a box of rice pudding - that, for me, was the American Dream.

In 1965, I went to what was called the worst Bihar famine in India, and I saw starvation, death, people dying of hunger, for the first time. It changed my life. I came back home, told my mother, 'I'd like to live and work in a village.' Mother went into a coma.

India is a land of plenty inhibited by poverty; India has an enthralling, uplifting civilization that sparkles not only in our magnificent art, but also in the enormous creativity and humanity of our daily life in city and village.