Quotes About Poverty

In the end, we may be hurting the very people we should be concerned about - the inner-city poor, those who already have to live with many risks in their daily lives, those who do not have clout here in Washington.

Liberal interventions that enable all children to shoot for their potential aren't just moral, they are pragmatic - any society that wastes talent to poverty or oppression isn't just evil: it is stupid.

Every social injustice is not only cruel, but it is economic waste.

By the breaking in of enraged merciless armies, flourishing countries have been laid waste, great numbers of people have perished in a short time, and many more have been pressed with poverty and grief.

Poverty wastes people; it wastes opportunity.

This is what I think about poverty: why waste the potential of people? You never know what you've got going in society unless you give people a chance.

I don't want to be an apologist for poverty, but I can't stand waste, useless spending, wasted energy and having to live squandering stuff.

We are unnecessarily wasting our precious resources in wars... if we must wage war, we have to do it on unemployment, disease, poverty, and backwardness.

Poor countries are poor because they are wasting their resources.

It has been tough when I have been with the national team and we have gone to play in some of the poorer areas in Brazil. You see people come and watch us train or play a match, and then you know some of them are going home with no food on the plate.

I could have easily been a statistic. Growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y., it was easy - a little too easy - to get into trouble. Surrounded by poor schools, lack of resources, high unemployment rates, poverty, gangs and more, I watched as many of my peers fell victim to a vicious cycle of diminished opportunities and imprisonment.

I've known what it's like to survive without a steady job. Growing up in the Philippines, I watched my parents juggle part-time jobs at the corner shop and as tailors, barely able to make ends meet for my three brothers and me.

I watched the 'Seven Samurai' a lot because I loved it growing up. I can't describe to you how powerful that was. When you're a kid, you can't watch an almost-three-hour movie, but this was a war I just never saw before, with these samurai. I could relate to it, just being poor.

In two years, I spent all my money on cars, watches, boots, discos, restaurants, and friends who, in reality, were not friends at all. For a boy like me, who grew up in a poor neighbourhood and without money, it was dangerous.

Like David Copperfield, I was born amidst poverty and grew up in poverty. I did not own shoes. I did not bathe in water from a tap. I did no know about forks and spoons.

Civil and political rights are critical, but not often the real problem for the destitute sick. My patients in Haiti can now vote but they can't get medical care or clean water.

My mother is most attached to my brother because she has the feeling that she could not provide him anything. By the time I was born, at least I got a meal and a half a day, but he sometimes got only water.

Obama might as well be president of Turkey or Brazil; it does not matter. It's the system that is absolutely flawed, where 25 or 35 or 50 people make multi, multi-billions on building Olympic structures while people live in Barbados and have no roads or clean drinking water. There's something pretty inequitable there.

Growing up in Nigeria I saw real poverty - I experienced it, including living without electricity and doing my homework by candlelight, because the state electricity board could not provide power, and fetching water in heavy, rusty buckets from a bore-hole a mile away, because the nationalised water company could not get water out of the taps.

Some countries have more water than others - some can afford to use clean water to flush their poop away, and some can't.

In my village where I'm from, there's still not running water everywhere. People are still struggling to get clean water.

Economic security can feel like an impossible goal when you're living paycheck to paycheck, deciding between paying the light bill or the water bill, knowing the decision to pay either one may mean you can't put food on the table.

In 1995, world military spending totaled nearly $800 billion. If we redirected just $40 billion of those resources over the next 10 years to fighting poverty, all of the world's population would enjoy basic social services, such as education, health care, nutrition, reproductive health, clean water and sanitation.

Prior to Katrina, the South Bronx and New Orleans' Ninth Ward had a lot in common. Both were largely populated by poor people of color, both hotbeds of cultural innovation: think hip-hop and jazz. Both are waterfront communities that host both industries and residents in close proximity of one another.