Quotes About Poverty

Es fácil que la gente se comporte como amiga cuando uno es rico, pero muy pocos harán lo mismo cuando uno es pobre. Si la riqueza es un imán, la pobreza es una especie de repelente.

Your imagination is the instrument, the means, whereby your redemption from slavery, sickness, and poverty is effected. If you refuse to assume the responsibility of the incarnation of a new and higher concept of yourself, then you reject the means, the only means, whereby your redemption — that is, the attainment of your ideal — can be effected.

poverty is not the result of rapacious financiers exploiting the poor. It has much more to do with the lack of financial institutions, with the absence of banks, not their presence. Only when borrowers have access to efficient credit networks can they escape from the clutches of loan sharks, and only when savers can deposit their money in reliable banks can it be channelled from the idle rich to the industrious poor.

the public knew, he thought, his feet in their heavy boots sliding among the syringes, if they knew how some people lived and how they died.

A Princeton University scholar, Susan Fiske, has used scans to show that the brains of high-achieving people see images of poor people and process them as if they were not humans but things.

Over the last fifty years, poverty has come to be seen not just as an economic failing but also as a moral one, prompting a pervasive suspicion that the poor are secretly living cushy lives on government benefits. A Pew poll found that wealthy Americans mostly agreed that "poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.

People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, State of the Union Address, 1944

One of the great failings of the American education system, in our view, is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad. Study-abroad

To be born poor in America today is to have a much smaller chance statistically of entering the middle class than was true a generation ago.

Maternal health generally gets minimal attention because those who die or suffer injuries overwhelmingly start with three strikes against them: They are female, they are poor, and they are rural. Women are marginalized in the developing world, They are an expendable commodity.

The first step toward better policy is to amend our understanding of people's struggles so that it is less about individual irresponsibility and more about our collective irresponsibility in tolerating levels of child poverty that would be unacceptable in the rest of the developed world.

Throughout this book, we've tried to argue that America has gone astray by perceiving poverty or drugs simply as a choice or as the consequence of personal irresponsibility. Yet in another sense, poverty is a choice. It is a choice by the country. The United States has chosen policies over the last half century that have resulted in higher levels of homelessness, overdose deaths, crime and inequality--and now it's time to make a difference choice.

Other countries over the decades expanded health-care coverage, adopted family-leave policies, extended mass transit and implemented child allowances to reduce poverty, while the United States bucked the trend by slashing taxes, cutting back hours at public libraries, raising tuition at state universities and allowing infrastructure to decay.

America's schools rarely convey much understanding of the 2.7 billion people (40 percent of the world's population) who today live on less than $2 a day.

Maternal mortality is an injustice that is tolerated only because its victims are poor, rural women. The best argument to stop it, however, isn't economic but ethical. What was horrifying about Prudence's death was not that the hospital allocated its resources poorly, but that it neglected a human being in its care.

THE AMERICAN ECONOMY HAS DAZZLED the world and its stock markets have created great riches, but the median American household is actually poorer in net worth today than it was in 2000.

Several studies have found that child poverty costs the United States about $ 1 trillion each year in increased health, crime, prison and welfare spending as well as in reduced earnings. That's about $ 8,000 per household annually. Most researchers find that each dollar invested in reducing child disadvantage would save the country at least $ 7.

America now lags behind its peer countries in health care and high-school graduation rates while suffering greater violence, poverty and addiction. This dysfunction damages all Americans:

The enemy of our country is poverty and hopelessness.

Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution have found that of people who follow three traditional rules—graduate from high school, get a full-time job and marry before having children—only 2 percent live in poverty. So play by these rules, called "the success sequence," and by and large one can avoid poverty. In contrast, of those who do none of those three things, 79 percent live in poverty.

In many poor countries, the problem is not so much individual thugs and rapists but an entire culture of sexual predation.

That sense of degradation, of being labeled inferior, is a central feature of the whirlpool of the working poor. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen has said that shame is the "irreducible absolutist core" of the experience of poverty. Poverty is about not just income but also humiliation, social exclusion, the stress of being forever lower on the social ladder.

Americans used to extol good-hearted Robin Hood, taking from the rich to give to the poor, and now we've stepped into the shoes of the Sheriff of Nottingham. When as a society we shrug at 30 million children living in low-income families in America, slashing their benefits while urging them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, we need to look in the mirror and have a good talk with ourselves.

We asked about the utilities, and Christine said proudly that the electricity was working, even though she hasn't paid the bills.