Quotes About Poverty

Poor people wait a lot. Welfare, unemployment lines, laundromats, phone booths, emergency rooms, jails, etc.

Fear, poverty, alcoholism, loneliness are terminal illnesses. Emergencies, in fact.

The bus is late. Cars drive by. Rich people n cars never look at people on the street, at all. Poor ones always do ... in fact it sometimes seems they're just driving around, looking at people on the street. I've done that. Poor people wait a lot. Welfare, unemployment lines, laundromats, phone booths, emergency rooms, jails, etc.

Basta darsi una guardatina intorno per rendersi conto: il dialogo, la solidarietà umana, il bisogno di agorà, il dividersi ogni giorno le gioie e i dolori, sono tutte prerogative dei popoli poveri, così come la privacy è figlia naturale della ricchezza.

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

My grandmother had six kids - one died as an infant - and she was dirt-poor, and all her kids got an education. And my mom grew up poor. And they both worked so hard and cultivated so much of their own happiness. I wanted to have that like an amulet. Not like armor, but like a magic feather. Like Dumbo's magic feather.

Oh, working man! Oh, starved, outraged, and robbed laborer, how long will you lend attentive ear to the authors of your misery?

It is the moving inspiration of our age, the only question worth struggling for: the question of how to lift humanity from poverty and despair.

The overseer's whip is now fully supplanted by the lash of hunger! And the auction block by the chain-gang and convict cell

We have laws, jails, courts, armies, guns and armories enough to make saints of us all, if they were the true preventives of crime; but we know they do not prevent crime; that wickedness and depravity exist in spite of them, nay, increase as the struggle between classes grows fiercer, wealth greater and more powerful and poverty more gaunt and desperate.

The true artist is not proud, he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal; and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun. I would, perhaps, rather come to you and your people, than to many rich folk who display inward poverty.

Even in poverty I lived like a king for I tell you that nobility is the thing that makes a king

It is the consumers who make poor people rich and rich people poor.

Diverting resources into uneconomic uses takes them away from other, more productive areas and costs jobs. Some jobs are lost; others are never created. The uneconomic effects of protectionism benefit a few—usually well-to-do—at the expense of the great majority, including the poor. Protectionism cannot be justified on economic or moral grounds. As Frederic Bastiat wrote, tariffs are "legalized plunder." The law is used to steal. By

All that society can achieve in these fields is to provide an environment which does not put insurmountable obstacles in the way of genius's and makes the common man free enough from material concerns to become interested in things other than mere breadwinning... the foremost social means of making a man more human is to fight poverty. Wisdom and science and the arts the way of genius and makes the common man free enough thrive better in a world of affluence than among needy peoples.

It is not the poverty of individuals and the community, not indebtedness to foreign nations, not the unfavourableness of the conditions of production, that force up the rate of exchange, but inflation.

Os discípulos de Jean-Jacques Rousseau que exultavam com a natureza e o estado paradisíaco do homem em seu estado natural não se deram conta do fato de que os meios de subsistência são escassos e que o estado natural do homem é a insegurança e a pobreza extrema.

every now and then, i worry about people in the third world countries. and then i figure if they all started having sex, their lives would be considerably brighter.

The distribution of sadness . . . by this I mean the overrepresentation of Mexican-origin populations in the bilges of poverty, and among the undereducated, underemployed, and underrepresented who suffer from poor mental and physical health and lack protection. They are also overrepresented in penal institutions and as war casualties. —Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez, "Regions of Refuge in the U.S.

Cities may be rebuilt, and a People reduced to Poverty, may acquire fresh Property: But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever. When the People once surrendered their share in the Legislature, and their Right of defending the Limitations upon the Government, and of resisting every Encroachment upon them, they can never regain it.

Lovat liked and detested London at the same time. He loathed the poverty that was all around and hated the smug indifference towards it from so many of the people he had to work with. He thought of Mrs Litvinov, a woman without two brass tacks to rub together, but more capacity for kindness than anyone very much in Whitehall.  Mrs Litvinov and her kind ought to run the country, he thought. And what a better country it might be.

I often ask myself whether my decision to pursue a life of scholarship -- if decision is the right word -- was a result of an essential poverty of the soul, or if the desiccation which I sometimes suspect is the one truly distinguishing mark of my scholarship was an inevitable consequence of that decision.

By undercutting fundamentalism and intolerance, education would curtail violence and war. By empowering women, it would curb poverty and the population explosion.

Governments rely on threat and trauma to survive. The easiest populace to rule is weak, poor, superstitious, preferably terrified of what tomorrow may bring