Quotes About Poverty

The welfare state is the most important innovation of any country in the postwar period. Before it, Denmark was split between 25 percent with the highest income, 25 percent at the bottom: now we have 4 percent at the top and 4 percent at the bottom.

The world is full of hatred because it refuses to be poor. It wants to conquer fear with power. But you will conquer in another way, the unknown way. First, perhaps, you will forget. You will not see. You will not understand. Later you may see, and then you will know that the false self must die in order for the true self to be born.

Obedience is the best form of poverty, Billy. I think that is the kind of martyrdom you have been given.

The pillars of wisdom are these: humility, powerlessness, poverty, loneliness, sickness, rejection, and abandonment.

Here are two facts that should not both be true: - There is sufficient food produced in the world every year to feed every human being on the planet. - Nearly 800 million people literally go hungry every day, with more than a third of the earth's population -- 2 billion men and women -- malnourished one way or another, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Here are two facts that should not both be true: • There is sufficient food produced every year to feed every human being on the planet. • Nearly 800 million people literally go hungry every day, with more than a third of the earth's population — 2 billion men and women — malnourished one way or another, according the United nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

To suggest that the lack of personal initiative is the source, and not the consequence, of poverty, is to confuse cause and effect" (p. 206).

And the same rapper who revels in a woman's finely proportioned behind may also speak against racism and on behalf of the poor, even as he encourages them not to look at hip-hop as their salvation.

But despite their poverty and their lack of material resources, food, housing, and so forth, the poor do have an enormous wealth in their knowledges and powers of creation.

A new figure of the poor is emerging, which includes not only the unemployed and the precarious workers with irregular, part-time work, but also the stable waged workers and the impoverished strata of the so-called middle class. Their poverty is characterized primarily by the chains of debt. The increasing generality of indebtedness today marks a return to relations of servitude reminiscent of another time. And yet, much has changed.

The other America, the America of poverty, is hidden today in a way that it never was before. Its millions are socially invisible to the rest of us…. The very development of American society is creating a new kind of blindness about poverty. The poor are increasingly slipping out of the very experience and consciousness of the nation.

Our affluent society contains those of talent and insight who are driven to prefer poverty, to choose it, rather than submit to the desolation of an empty abundance.

The measure of a country's prosperity should not be how many poor people drive cars, but how many affluent people use public transportation.

the self-satisfaction and material preoccupations of his time was independent of his point about the injustices of poverty, the Vietnam War, and racial discrimination. But he saw them as connected. To reverse these injustices, Kennedy thought it necessary to challenge the complacent way of life he saw around him. He did not hesitate to be judgmental. And yet, by invoking Americans' pride in their country, he also, at the same time, appealed to a sense of community.

La capacidad de ascender, al parecer, no depende tanto del deseo de salir de la pobreza como del acceso a la educación, la sanidad y otros recursos que preparan a las personas para tener éxito en el mundo laboral.

Of those born poor in America, few make it to the top. In fact, most do not even make it to the middle class.

Sin embargo, ayudar a los desfavorecidos porque son víctimas de circunstancias que escapan a su control tiene un precio moral y cívico elevado. Da pábulo a la idea denigrante de que los perceptores de ayudas públicas tienen poco que contribuir y son incapaces de ser agentes responsables.

The United States, we tell ourselves, can afford to worry less about inequality than the class-bound societies of Europe because here, it is possible to rise. Seventy percent of Americans believe the poor can make it out of poverty on their own, while only 35 percent of Europeans think so. This faith in mobility may explain why the U.S. has a less-generous welfare state than most major European countries.

Of those born poor in America, few make it to the top. In fact, most do not even make it to the middle class. Studies of upward mobility typically divide the income ladder into five rungs. Of those born on the bottom rung, only around 4 to 7 percent rise to the top, and only about a third reach the middle rung or higher. Although the exact numbers vary from one study to the next, very few Americans live out the "rags to riches" story celebrated in the American dream.37

If the anti-abortion movement took a tenth of the energy they put into noisy theatrics and devoted it to improving the lives of children who have been born into lives of poverty, violence, and neglect, they could make a world shine.

A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.

I hated what this country had become and wanted nothing more than to hold up a mirror so its citizens could see it for what it truly was, not the Land of Opportunity for which our forefathers fought and died, but as the fascist regime that served to funnel the money upward from those most in need into the pockets of those who would see them all starve in the streets, the same men who took away their livelihoods and stranded them in a city rotting beneath their very feet.

In Philadelphia, our public safety, poverty reduction, health and economic development all start with education. We can't grow the middle class if we don't give our kids the tools they need to innovate and invent.

The Buddhist version of poverty is a situation where you have nothing to contribute.