Poverty Quotes

“When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences.”
― Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“It is a common condition of being poor... you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.”
― Rick Bragg

“And that’s when things get messy. When people begin moving beyond charity and toward justice and solidarity with the poor and oppressed, as Jesus did, they get in trouble. Once we are actually friends with the folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity. One of my friends has a shirt marked with the words of late Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara: “When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me a communist.” Charity wins awards and applause but joining the poor gets you killed. People do not get crucified for living out of love that disrupts the social order that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them.”
― Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“It’s all about the company you keep, isn’t it, Chief Inspector? Now Mr Trenton, who I know wouldn’t hurt a fly, has certain…preferences, if you know what I mean.’ He gave Merlin a meaningful look. ‘I don’t want to get anyone into trouble, of course.”
― Mark Ellis, Death of an Officer

“The obscenities of this country are not girls like you. It is the poverty which is obscene, and the criminal irresponsibility of the leaders who make this poverty a deadening reality. The obscenities in this country are the places of the rich, the new hotels made at the expense of the people, the hospitals where the poor die when they get sick because they don't have the money either for medicines or services. It is only in this light that the real definition of obscenity should be made.”
― F. Sionil José, Ermita

“We must powder our wigs; that is why so many poor people have no bread.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“If I were hungry and friendless today, I would rather take my chances with a saloon-keeper than with the average preacher.”
― Eugene V. Debs

“Our entire system, in an economic sense, is based on restriction. Scarcity and inefficiency are the movers of money; the more there is of any resource the less you can charge for it. The more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money.

This reality is a social disease, for people can actually gain off the misery of others and the destruction of the environment. Efficiency, abundance and sustainability are enemies of our economic structure, for they are inverse to the mechanics required to perpetuate consumption.

This is profoundly critical to understand, for once you put this together you begin to see that the one billion people currently starving on this planet, the endless slums of the poor and all the horrors of a culture due to poverty and pravity are not natural phenomenon due to some natural human order or lack of earthly resources. They are products of the creation, perpetuation and preservation of artificial scarcity and inefficiency.”
― Peter Joseph

“All this is simply to say that all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty or thirty years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, and poverty of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.”
― Plato, The Republic

“But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

“The fact that the poor are alive is clear proof of their ability.”
― Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“Some people will insult your intelligence by suddenly being nice or nicer to you once you make it … or they think you have.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“When you have half of Caironese in slums, when you don't have clean water, when you don't have a sewer system, when you don't have electricity, and on top of that you live under one of the most repressive regimes right now... Well, put all that together, and it's a ticking bomb. It's not of a question of threat; it is question of looking around at the present environment and making a rational prognosis.”
― Mohamed ElBaradei

“Royce Westmoreland stared at him with biting scorn. "I despise hypocrisy, particularly when it is coated with holiness."
"May I ask for a specific example?"
"Fat priests," Royce replied, "with fat purses, who lecture staving peasants on the dangers of gluttony and the merits of poverty.”
― Judith McNaught, A Kingdom of Dreams

“Shyness is a luxury reserved for those who are above the poverty line. To a beggar, being shy is deadly.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

“Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“Even today we don't pay serious attention to the issue of poverty, because the powerful remain relatively untouched by it. Most people distance themselves from the issue by saying that if the poor worked harder, they wouldn't be poor.”
― Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said. "There is noth-ing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes tocondemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“While there is a lower class, I am in it.
While there is a criminal element, I am of it.
While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
― Eugene Debs

“In Paris there are two dens, one for thieves, the other for murderers. The den of thieves is the Stock Exchange; the den of murderers is the Courthouse.”
― Petrus Borel, Champavert Le Lycanthrope

“But then it is easy, too easy, to sermonize about the dangers of paternalism and the need to take responsibility for our own lives, from the comfort of our couch in our safe and sanitary home. Aren't we, those who live in the rich world, the constant beneficiaries of a paternalism now so thoroughly embedded into the system that we hardly notice it?”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

“I hate the people who live here. May Beth always told me I can't do that; I can't hate people for having more than me, but she's wrong. I can. I do.”
― Courtney Summers, Sadie

“The world has a very serious problem, my friend' Shiva went on. 'Poor children still die by their millions. Westerners and the global rich -- like me -- live in post-scarcity society, while a billion people struggle to get enough to eat. And we're pushing the planet towards a tipping point, where the corals die and the forests burn and life becomes much, much harder. We have the resources to solve those problems, even now, but politics and economics and nationalism all get in the way. If we could access all those minds, though...”
― Ramez Naam, Crux

“Poverty does not belong in civilized human society. Its proper place is in a museum. That's where it will be.”
― Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“I began to come into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease, with the inability to cure a child because of a lack of resources… And I began to see there was something that, at that time, seemed to me almost as important as being a famous researcher or making some substantial contribution to medical science, and this was helping those people.”
― Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

“They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience

“If we adopt the same collaborative mindset and practices that got to the moon and back, and that built the International Space Station, we can alleviate poverty—and do much more.”
― Ron Garan, The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture from a Journey of 71 Million Miles

“Nothing awakens the conscience like a lot of money.”
― P Sainath