Quotes About Poverty

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937

Canadians and Europeans pay higher taxes and get universal health care, less poverty and homelessness, lower addiction rates and arguably more humane societies, and that's probably a worthwhile trade-off.

BY EVEN A CONSERVATIVE COUNT, there are more than half a million homeless people in America at any one time, including nearly two hundred thousand living on the streets rather than in shelters. Homelessness has increased in the last forty years even as America has become much wealthier, because of a confluence of factors. After World

The United States has about 13 million children living in poverty. Of those, about 2 million may live in "extreme poverty" by global definitions (in households earning less than about $2 per person per day), when looking at their cash incomes. These kids would be considered extremely poor if they lived in Congo or Bangladesh, yet they're here in the United States.

Here, in impoverished northern India state of Bihar, near the Nepalese border, there's not much else available commercially-- except sex.

But they had learned an important lesson about how defeating poverty is more difficult than it seems at first.

Punishing and imprisoning the poor is the distinctively American response to poverty in the twenty-first century. Workers who cannot pay their debts, those who cannot afford private probation services, minorities targeted for traffic infractions, the homeless, the mentally ill, fathers who cannot pay child support and many others are all locked up. Mass incarceration is used to make social problems temporarily invisible and to create the mirage of something having been done.

The National Academies of Sciences, Medicine and Engineering, tasked by Congress with investigating how to reduce child poverty in the United States, issued a landmark report in 2019 that concluded that each year child poverty costs Americans about $1 trillion in crime, education and welfare costs and related expenses.

lifetime risk of maternal death is one thousand times higher in a poor country than in the West. That should be an international scandal. The gap, moreover, is getting wider.

America is going to hell if we don't use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life. —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

There's a brittleness to life for about 150 million Americans, with a constant risk that sickness, layoffs or a car accident will cause everything to collapse. One in seven Americans lives below the poverty line, a substantially higher rate than in Canada or other OECD countries, and scholars estimate that half of all Americans will at some point slip below the line.

Sharecroppers traded at a plantation-owned commissary, often in scrip rather than money. (Martin Luther King, Jr., on a visit to an Alabama plantation in 1965, was amazed to meet sharecroppers who had never seen United States currency in their lives.)

It doesn't look poor. The place looks

Music is storming, driving, relentless, devotional, slinky, subtle, heartbreakingly-beautiful sounds that, lyrically, switch from the cynical to the sanguine, the defeated to the defiant, dealing in love, war, beauty, children, romance, rejection, Pethedine, poetry, panties, God, Auden, Johnny Cash, cold potatoes, too-much-money, not enough money, writer's block, flowers, animals and more flowers. But maybe I'm projecting here.

Academics, students, readers of and writers for most leftish newspapers and all but the bravest Muslim and poor world intellectuals share this group's defining unwillingness to condemn crimes that can't be blamed on the West.

Rich people defeat obesity through gene therapy. It's a fairly simple procedure, adjusting the metabolism. Poor people are stuck with diet and exercise.

The imbecile does not discover the radical misery of our condition except when he is sick, poor, or old.

Humanity longs to free itself from poverty, from toil, from war—from everything which few escape without degrading themselves.

What concerns the Christ of the Gospels is not the economic situation of the poor man, but the moral condition of the rich man.

With poverty everything becomes frightful.

Gold gives an appearance of beauty even to ugliness: But with poverty everything becomes frightful.

Nature didn't tell me Don't be poor; and certainly didn't say: Get rich; but she did shout: Always be independent!

Nature never said to me: Do not be poor; still less did she say: Be rich; her cry to me was always: Be independent.

I understand that people might be poor if they don't have any work, but I don't accept that someone is poor if they've worked really hard.