Quotes About Poverty

I was so poor growing up...if I wasn't a boy...I'd have nothing to play with.

Another good thing about being poor is that when you are seventy your children will not have you declared legally insane in order to gain control of your estate.

I'm so poor I can't even pay attention.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

Men won't easily give up a system in which half the world's population works for next to nothing...[and recognizes that]precisely because that half works for so little, it may have no energy left to fight for anything else.

Better I am poor in a country where I can feel at home. Where I am wanted, than to live like this.

Unlike curing cancer or heart disease, we already know how to beat hunger: food.

Working at the Food Bank with my kids is an eye-opener. The face of hunger isn't the bum on the street drinking Sterno; it's the working poor. They don't look any different, they don't behave any differently, they're not really any less educated. They are incredibly less privileged, and that's it. And they have to work a lot longer and harder than more privileged people do.

Working at the Food Bank with my kids is an eye-opener. The face of hunger isn't the bum on the street drinking Sterno it's the working poor. They don't look any different, they don't behave any differently, they're not really any less educated. They are incredibly less privileged, and that's it.

Si cuarenta mil niños sucumben diariamente en el purgatorio del hambre y de la sed si la tortura de los pobres cuerpos envilece una a una a las almas y si el poder se ufana de sus cuarentenas o si los pobres de solemnidad son cada vez menos solemnes y más pobres ya es bastante grave que un solo hombre o una sola mujer contemplen distraídos el horizonte neutro pero en cambio es atroz sencillamente atroz si es la humanidad la que se encoge de hombros.

very poor men are seldom bad. And that very bad men are seldom poor.

Good God, with a bounty Look down on Marion County, For the soil is so pore, and so awful rooty, too, I don't know what to God the pore folks gonna do.

This, then, was hunger. This was what his mother had meant when she had said, "We'll all go hongry." He had laughed, for he had thought he had known hunger, and it was faintly pleasant. He knew now that it had been only appetite. This was another thing.

1 billion people in the world are chronically hungry. 1 billion people are overweight.

The victims of highway building tended to be overwhelmingly poor and black.

Inner-city slums could be cleared, blacks removed to more distant second-ghetto areas, central business districts redeveloped, and transportation woes solved all at the same time — and mostly at federal expense.

what right [do] people in wealthy countries have to blame the poor for their poverty, much less for humanity's environmental dilemma, when it [is] rich countries' consumption patterns that [are] responsible for the vast majority of the world's resource depletion and ecosystem destruction?

If all poor people refused to fight, he argued, the rich would have no army and there would be no war.

Not only are targeted, racialized groups "massified" for control with disintegrative consequences, but society as a whole also undergoes another form of massifying: a destructive balkanization of poorer groups made subordinate to an increasingly concentrated wealthy elite. Society

Today, the links between young black, brown, or poor people and mass incarceration are all the more startling and fearsome. We now have the documented reality of the "school-to-prison pipeline" that often gives up on excellence of education and a professional future for America's racialized poor, and then "tracks" them into jobs and communities where vulnerability enhances the likelihood of warehousing in prison.

Increasingly, U.S. private prisons construct and manage the poor in carceral institutions, for profit. But corporations also offer privatized services to local, state, and federal governments for their carceral facilities. Private

Private prisons are an offspring of the larger incarceration binge we have been tracing. The private prisons mark the spaces in U.S. society where the bodies of the poor most dramatically show the results of the policies comprehensively inaugurated by the Ronald Reagan presidency, which sought to privatize in the early 1980s as many government functions as possible. The

The skeptic often retorts that the "criminally-minded" regularly refuse to admit their own wrongdoing and responsibility. But this is a callous and self-justifying skepticism that overlooks just how easy it is to fall down the road to prison as a result of others' unfair practices, vicious action, or because of the vicissitudes of navigating corporate-driven dispossession, poverty, and racism.

The death penalty is almost universally a punishment for the poor, for those without the money to get competent counsel. The adage remains true about the death penalty: "Those without the capital get the punishment.