Quotes About Poverty

When I saw the rats the first time, I wanted to drop my basket where it was and run away, but we weren t rich enough for symbolic gestures. So I walked.

Love is the common currency of the poor.

The weary Italian woman nodded at her children behind her. "Where we came from, everybody lives only one kind of life. Alessandro said he wanted his children to choose the life, not the life to choose the children. And also," she added, panting, slowing down and wiping her brow, "he said America is the only place in the world where even the poor can be smart.

La Unión Soviética había resultado ser una tierra de pobreza compartida. El comunismo no funcionaba en Rusia tan bien como se esperaba precisamente porque era Rusia. Hubiera funcionado a lo grande en Estados Unidos, pensó Harold. Aquél era el lugar para el comunismo.

I must intervene in teaching the peasants that their hunger is socially constructed and work with them to help identify those responsible for this social construction, which is, in my view, a crime against humanity. Therefore, we need to intervene not only pedagogically but also ethically.

Aos esfarrapados do mundo e aos que neles se descobrem e, assim descobrindo-se, com eles sofrem, mas, sobretudo, com eles lutam.

It's amazing that no matter how much money you have, you can make some bad decisions, and in five months you're on the street, begging.

Hungry people cannot be good at learning or producing anything, except perhaps violence.

Sueña el rico en su riqueza, que más cuidados le ofrece; sueña el pobre que padece su miseria y su pobreza; sueña el que a medrar empieza, sueña el que afana y pretende, sueña el que agravia y ofende, y en este mundo, en conclusión, todos sueñan lo que son, aunque ninguno lo entiende.

Pedro Juan Gutiérrez

La pobre novela de la risa nacional se complace en inventar estereotipos de pobres hilachentos y mujeres de cuatro dientes, degradados por el sin sentido de sus parches.

He] did not understand women. It wasn't the way bartenders or comedians didn't understand women, it was the way poor people didn't understand the economy. You could stand outside the Girard Bank Building every day of your life and never guess anything about what went on in there. That's why, in their hearts, they'd always rather stick up a 7-Eleven.

One in five American children are living in poverty, and yet, according to the Barna Research Group, 'half of all adults did nothing at all in the past year to help a poor person' and 'few churches have a serious ministry to the poor.' With such crying needs and such self-absorption among God's people, surely things have never been worse.

If our prayers for others mean anything at all, they cannot be cloistered away all the time in sanitised environments. Standing in the gap for the oppressed may well mean that it matters where we pray and how we pray, and that our prayers for the poor are worked out very practically.

In 1955, there were 150,000 New Yorkers on welfare; in 1995, there were 1.3 million.

our technology and our economic system seem to produce the present bad situation: millions of people feel themselves poor and powerless; millions feel that music is something to be made only by experts.

The rising tide does not lift all boats. Those at the bottom and at the margin are considered undeserving; they are today's equivalent of scripture's widows, orphans, and immigrants.

I've always been after the trappings of great luxury. But all I've got hold of are the trappings of great poverty. I've got hold of the wrong load of trappings, and a rotten load they are too, ones I could have very well done without.

Race and class divisions, power imbalances, anti-intellectualism, anti-democratic leanings, and widespread poverty—not to mention Ponzi schemes—once we saw them as glitches in a country built on high ideals. The Great Man showed us otherwise. The flaws we had called incidental were underpinnings. They comprised a grand tradition, present always.

For most of the past forty years, the American economy has been successful in producing jobs but distressingly unsuccessful in producing jobs that lead to a livable income.

But all we have now is rule by rich people, the ones who keep ninety percent of the world in relative poverty so their unbalanced market can continue paying for a lifestyle of total excess.

It had to be done, they were determined about that; some attempt had to be made to break the cycle of crime and poverty.

It's not governments I have an issue with—or not the concept of democratic government, anyway. But all we have now is rule by rich people, the ones who keep ninety percent of the world in relative poverty so their unbalanced market can continue paying for a lifestyle of total excess.

It was not the military prowess of the Germani that kept them outside the Empire, but their poverty.11