Quotes About Poverty

When you grow up in poverty, suffer from abuse, live in a violent neighborhood, come from a broken home, lack positive role models, are told you'll never amount to anything, etc, the challenges are enormous.

Psychologically, it's difficult to ever shrug off the effects of extreme hardship or poverty, family bereavement, chronic ill health or the memory of violent conflict.

The familiar mood that awaits the sensitive young who are poor and dispossessed is a mood of sharp and painful inferiority, of violently angry tensions, of desperate and overwhelming longings.

There are environmental threats to health; there are internal threats to health - genetic conditions, viral threats, diseases like cancer and Parkinson's. And then there are societal and global ones, like poverty and lack of nutrition. And unknown viral threats - everything from a new kind of influenza to hemorrhagic fever.

A short distance away from thriving city centres in virtually all of our cities, you will find areas of endemic worklessness, alienation, crime and antisocial behaviour.

What is superfluous to your poor estate, distribute. This is distributive charity: a virtue so sacred that crimes against it are the forerunner of inevitable doom.

Much good art got made while money ruled; I like a lot of it, and hardship and poverty aren't virtues. The good news is that, since almost no one will be selling art, artists - especially emerging ones - won't have to think about turning out a consistent style or creating a brand. They'll be able to experiment as much as they want.

At Camfed, we have focused on transforming the vicious cycle of poverty in many rural African communities into a cycle of opportunity. Alumnae of Camfed's programs go on to become role models and mentors for future generations of young students. We call this the 'virtuous circle,' and we know this is a model that works.

We started the AIDS virus. We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty.

If I cannot address the issue of visible homelessness and abject poverty on the streets of this community, I will not get re-elected in four years.

I'm not quite sure precisely when social and political activism became a visible brand of my DNA, but it seems to me that I was born into it. It is hard to be born into the experience in the world of poverty and not develop some instinct for survival and resistance to those things that oppress you.

I have a fear of poverty in old age. I have this vision of myself living in a skip and eating cat food. It's because I'm freelance, and I've never had a proper job. I don't have a pension, and my savings are dwindling. I always thought someone would just come along and look after me.

I feel both isolated from poverty – I do not know what my neighbors need or if they need anything – and surrounded by it because now we know all about the hunger and death in the world, and everyone is my neighbor.

Nobody in Colonial America, to be sure, believed that society owed every child the ultimate in education, but intelligence, industry, and thrift combined with ambition got many a poor man's son into the colonial colleges.

Most people die at the last minute others 20 years beforehand, some even earlier. They are the wretched of the earth.

Another of them died last night. His body was in the bazaar this morning. It lay, with a collecting bowl at its feet, on the charpoy that is reserved for those who die without money or family to bury them. He looked desiccated and his skin had the sheen and color of the dates we eat to break our fast. There are new bodies on that charpoy every week.

Some people feel guilty for creating illness, or poverty, or problems. They choose to interpret responsibility as guilt.

For every habit we have, for every experience we go through over and over, for every pattern we repeat, there is a NEED WITHIN US for it. The need corresponds to some belief we have. If there were not a need, we wouldn't have it, do it, or be it. There is something within us that needs the fat, the poor relationships, the failures, the cigarettes, the anger, the poverty, the abuse, or whatever there is that's a problem for us.

Told them to have more and more babies. Kept them pregnant and poor and ignorant.

I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

There's a point of poverty at which the spirit isn't with the body all the time. It finds the body really too unbearable. So it's almost as if you were talking to the soul itself. And a soul's not properly responsible.

As Pa speaks, I know he thinks someone in our family has stolen the rice. The story of the rat is not true and everyone knows it. Convinced that he realises it was me, I hide my eyes from him. Shame burns my hand like a hot iron branding me for all to see; Pa's favourite child stole from the family. As if to rescue me,Geak wakes up and her screams of hunger interrupt the incident.

But all God's angels come to us disguised: sorrow and sickness, poverty and death, one after other lift their frowning masks, and we behold the Seraph's face beneath, all radiant with the glory and the calm of having looked upon the front of God.

New York's ghosts are the unresting souls of the poor, the marginal, the dispossessed, the depraved, the defective, the recalcitrant. They are the guardian spirits of the urban wilderness in which they lived and died.