Top 100 About Poverty Quotes
#1. The essential role of the environment is still marginal in discussions about poverty. While we continue to debate these initiatives, environmental degradation, including the loss of biodiversity and topsoil, accelerates, causing development efforts to falter.
Wangari Maathai
#2. I know what it means to go to the stream to fetch water ... what it means when people are poor and don't have enough to eat. It's not enough to say you know about poverty. You have to live it.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
#3. If I care about poverty, I have to care a lot about investments in the private sector. The private sector creates the vast majority of jobs in the world, and social protection only goes so far.
Jim Yong Kim
#4. I was advocating for world peace, but I was waging a violent war against my own body. I was speaking about poverty and starvation, but I was eating more than my fair share. I was a hypocrite.
Bryant H. McGill
#5. When you've cooked the marrow of the sun and moon, The pearl is so bright you don't worry about poverty.
Sun Bu'er
#6. No matter what they say in the conferences and symposiums about poverty and hunger in the world. At the end, they are the first one forgetting us.
M.F. Moonzajer
#7. As writers, we don't just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience.
Jennifer Gilmore
#8. A gentleman, in his plans, thinks of the Way; he does not think how he is going to make a living. Even farming sometimes has a shortage; and even learning may incidentally bring a salary. A gentleman is concerned with the progress of the Way; he is not anxious about poverty.
Confucius
#9. The people who say poverty is no excuse for low performance are now using teacher accountability as an excuse for doing nothing about poverty.
David Berliner
#10. We must start talking differently about poverty
and start doing something differently.
Gary Haugen
#11. The causes of crime are very complicated. But there is a very big literature, as you know, about single parenthood in crime, about race in crime, and about poverty in crime.
Bill Bennett
#12. I've come across a lot of people in my life who talk about poverty and talk about the poor, but you rarely have a sense that it matters to them to the point at which they will be willing to sacrifice something.
Kumi Naidoo
#13. Churches know more about poverty than any government will ever know, because we're dealing with the poor every day.
Rick Warren
#14. Until now their line has been that the Tories are incapable of doing anything about poverty, and aren't interested in doing it in the first place. By contrast, Labour says, we are also incapable of doing anything about poverty, but would dearly love to do something. If we knew what.
Simon Hoggart
#15. Literary tradition is full of lies about poverty-the jolly beggar, the poor but happy milkmaid, the wholesome diet of porridge, etc.
Mason Cooley
#16. I've spent so many years talking about poverty and economic justice, I'm strongly tempted to get biblical. Jesus' teachings are so radical; they're just insanely generous and apocalyptic. Christians become more fascinated by the dead Jesus. They don't like the living Jesus.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#17. The good thing about poverty is it keeps you from getting in trouble because if you can't afford drugs, people will stop giving them to you very quickly. So, being poor really helps - it's the success that kills you.
Tommy Chong
#18. I don't, when I think of a city, think of these people, people with very little who are content with that. That is, I think about poverty and culture and traffic and pollution and crime...
Jon Chopan
#19. No one ever got rich by studying poverty and thinking about poverty.
Wallace D. Wattles
#21. Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog of its difficulties.
Leslie Jamison
#22. We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.
Dorothy Day
#23. Don't be didactic - don't write about poverty. Write about poor people. When you dramatize their lives and let life and characters be your inspiration, you will express the 'idea' dynamically and without preaching.
Robert McKee
#24. There is nothing more sickening than talking about poverty over a fancy dinner.
Shane Claiborne
#25. When the producers of 'Why Poverty?' came to me to do a film about poverty in the United States, I asked if I could do a film about wealth instead. I tend to make films about perpetrators, rather than victims.
Alex Gibney
#26. Rather than trying to put an end to Eminem or some other rapper, politicians should think about why they're rapping. It's easier to try to censor some kid who's swearing about poverty than it is to stop the poverty.
Willie Nelson
#27. Newt Gingrich and his fellow conservative Republicans talked a good game but, despite the lip service they offered about poverty and race and other social issues, they didn't really mean it.
Arianna Huffington
#28. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#29. What does a car bomb say about poverty, or the execution of a rural mayor explain about disenfranchisement? ...
The war had become, it it wasn't from the beginning, an indecipherable text.
Daniel Alarcon
#30. The worst thing about poverty is not the actual living of it, but the shame of it.
Dolly Parton
#31. It's difficult to write about poverty in a way that doesn't feel cliched.
Jake Halpern
#32. I am not so repelled by Communism: an element of Communism in politics is necessary and inevitable. In any involved society there must be a feeling that something must be done about poverty - which is the basis of communism.
Rebecca West
#33. Trade justice for the developing world and for this generation is a truly significant way for the developed countries to show commitment to bringing about an end to global poverty.
Nelson Mandela
#34. How can one not speak about war, poverty, and inequality when people who suffer from these afflictions don't have a voice to speak?
Isabel Allende
#35. In the Catholic Worker we must try to have the voluntary poverty of St. Francis, the charity of St. Vincent de Paul, the intellectual approach of St. Dominic, the easy conversations about things that matter of St. Philip Neri, the manual labor of St. Benedict.
Peter Maurin
#36. Somehow, I realized I could write books about black characters who reflected my own experiences or otherworldly experiences - not just stories of history, poverty and oppression.
Tananarive Due
#38. We regard wealth as something to be properly used, rather than as something to boast about. As for poverty, no one need be ashamed to admit it: the real shame is in not taking practical measures to escape from it.
Pericles
#39. In the past, the poverty they shared had a certain sweetness about it. When the end of the day came and they would eat their dinner in silence with the oil lamp between them, there was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment.
Albert Camus
#40. Opium and heroin had not caused our poverty and hopelessness. Rather, poverty and hopelessness had brought about an unquenchable desire to forget. After
Lisa See
#41. Humility, or poverty of spirit, is not a matter of thinking low thoughts about ourselves. It is not a matter of groveling in the dust. It is simply a matter of knowing ourselves as we really are. And when we see ourselves as we really are, we will see that we are poor.
John W. Miller
#42. I do get scared about the physical danger from drug dealers. But it's not in the same league as the danger I feel eating an $80 lunch with my privileged friends to discuss hunger and poverty. That's when my soul feels imperiled.
Jonathan Kozol
#43. The day you forget about the poors, you become the poorest of the poor!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#44. You know what I mean. I'm telling you I was stupid over it. I thought it was about trying so hard to survive that you didn't have the time to be a good parent. Obviously, that's not it. Because you and I, we're both ... wealthy in love.
Maggie Stiefvater
#45. When we struggle, as so many do, in grinding poverty, or when our enemies prevail against us, or when sickness is not healed, the enemy of our souls can send his evil message that there is no God or that if He exists He does not care about us.
Henry B. Eyring
#46. I am not here to judge whether people are locked in poverty because of themselves or because of the society in which they live. All I know is that they are there and we are trying to do something about it.
Hubert H. Humphrey
#47. You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city - you don't need to go to Beirut for that - but a foreign correspondent begins to understand poverty from a different perspective.
P. J. O'Rourke
#48. The Labor roots are very strong.Paul Keating, made a comment several years ago about looking at that dragging yourself out of poverty, dragging yourself out of that situation.
Warren Mundine
#49. I'm not a philanthropist. While I care about the poor, the issue of local or global poverty doesn't keep me up at night.
Andy Stanley
#50. I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people.
Michel Faber
#51. Technology has changed things, same as everywhere. But the economy has changed drastically. When Jamaica first won independence, our dollar was stronger than the U.S. dollar. Now ours is about 90 to one. That's had a big impact on crime and poverty.
Damian Marley
#52. I knew there was a way out. I knew there was another kind of life because I had read about it. I knew there were other places, and there was another way of being.
Oprah Winfrey
#53. Poverty is not only about income poverty, it is about the deprivation of economic and social rights, insecurity, discrimination, exclusion and powerlessness. That is why human rights must not be ignored but given even greater prominence in times of economic crisis.
Irene Khan
#54. The first world is going to have to account for this sort of horrible poverty in our midst. We have to, first of all, become aware of it. We have to take responsibility for it. And then we have to do something about it for our own freedom, for our own salvation, for our own humanity.
Martin Sheen
#55. Business is one of the most powerful institutions on Earth for creating wealth and opportunity and helping to lift people out of poverty. When you think about it that way, then business is not separate from development policy.
Peter Blair Henry
#56. Martin Luther King was talking about racism, war and poverty. I think we have made progress enormous progress in racism and war, but we have made little or no progress in poverty. And it's because the economy has gotten more and more complex as we have globalized.
Andrew Young
#57. The debate that I'm interested in having is with seriously smart people about how we design institutions in the 21st century that will genuinely address problems of poverty and educational underachievement.
Niall Ferguson
#58. It's not about success and failure. It's not about good days and bad days. It's not about wealth or poverty. It's not about health or sickness. It's not even about life or death. It's about glorifying God in whatever circumstance you find yourself in.
Mark Batterson
#59. When you talk about war on poverty it doesn't mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today.
Ben Shahn
#60. Remember that disadvantage is less about income than environment. The best metrics of child poverty aren't monetary, but rather how often a child is read to or hugged.
Nicholas Kristof
#61. I wonder what children whose parents have money think about in their spare time.
Gary Shteyngart
#62. Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#63. This is the first generation in all of recorded history that can do something about the scourge of poverty. We have the means to do it. We can banish hunger from the face of the earth.
Hubert H. Humphrey
#64. A Man's management of his own purse speaks volumes about character
Thomas Jefferson
#65. The absence of knowledge of the truths about money leads to poverty and financial slavery.
Sunday Adelaja
#66. Where writers are from is one of the world' s most boring topics. Where we're born, gender or race, wealth or poverty - those are the things we spend time talking about. Stop trying to label me. I'm a writer. Worry about whether I'm any good!
M. J. Hyland
#67. If the pocket goes dry but the mind is fertile, awake and plant something noble in the mind and you shall surely reap something noble in the end, no matter what!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#68. Dare we care at all about current fashions if that means reducing our ability to help hungry neighbors? How many more luxuries should we buy for ourselves and our children when others are dying for lack of bread?
Ronald J. Sider
#69. Never be diplomatic and careful about the treasure God gives. This is poverty triumphant.
Oswald Chambers
#70. Let's face it - think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth?
Henry Louis Gates
#71. Even though he grew up in churches, raised by church people, Waterhouse (as must be obvious by this point) never really understood their attitudes about sex. Why did they get so hung up on that one issue, when there were others like murder, war, poverty, and pestilence?
Neal Stephenson
#72. I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women.
Eve Arnold
#73. How often do the poor daydream of a better life? Plenty, no doubt, and where does it get them? It is the poor who begin with a daydream and realize at some point that they have to get up, roll their sleeves, and start doing something about those day dreams who succeed. And there are many who have.
Stephen Richards
#74. I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality.
Judith Butler
#75. Don't ever feel sad about who you are. Don't wish to be a daughter or son to a wealthy home, just because you think you're poor. Look! Everybody's poor, i discovered it when i realized that its not everything that President Barrack Obama has.
Michael Bassey Johnson
#76. You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the meek. She didn't go on to say anything about inheriting the earth.
Margaret Atwood
#77. Living simply is not about living in poverty or self-inflicted deprivation. It's about living an examined life where one has determined what is truly important and enough ... and then just let go of all the rest.
Duane Elgin
#78. My dick didn't seem to be aware that she was there. She kept asking me what was wrong, and I was so out of it that I thought she meant what was wrong with the world, so I started talking about global poverty and shit. I'm not surprised she left. I suspect she won't be coming back.
Nikki Sixx
#79. Then they start going on about cancer and how organic living is the way forward, totally ignoring how expensive it is to be organic and that there are a lot of people out there grateful if they can afford regular living.
Lisa O'Donnell
#80. Poverty is not just about income: it's about aspiration. It's not just about giving people a couple of extra pounds a week, welcome though that is.
Theresa May
#82. Poverty is a scorpion; it stings the poor and it also stings the men with high conscience who feel sad about the poverty; the rest is immune to it!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#83. Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.
Joseph Stiglitz
#84. Misery, we repeat, had been good for him. Poverty in youth, when it succeeds, has this magnificent property about it, that it turns the whole will towards effort, and the whole soul towards aspiration.
Victor Hugo
#85. Poverty doesn't give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.
Sherman Alexie
#86. Parsons always seem to be specially horrified about things like sunbathing and naked bodies. They don't mind poverty and misery and cruelty to animals nearly as much.
Susan Ertz
#87. Because we live in a democracy, and the people can't govern themselves well if they don't know the truth about the world we live in. What if our rich citizens never hear of the poverty and suffering of the rest of the city? Why should they ever give to charity or vote for reform?
Rosslyn Elliott
#88. The Democrats need poor, dependent people if they're gonna stay in business. And if we don't have enough poverty at home, we'll import it. That's what our open-borders policy is: It's about importing poverty and importing the number of potential registered voters for the Democrat party.
Rush Limbaugh
#89. Don't whine about your poverty and brainless labor. You can read, can't you? Get thee to a library and foment rebellion - in both inner and outer worlds.
Bill Holm
#90. I've never heard anyone come back from downtown Baltimore waxing poetic about the authenticity of poverty.
Lisa Samson
#91. You have increasing poverty and increasing wealth. Fine food is one way to dispense with a lot of money ... It's understanding that our daily choices about food connect us to a worldwide economic system. And that economic system - not scarcity - creates worldwide hunger for millions of people.
Frances Moore Lappe
#92. I've never been anywhere in my life like it and I only really noticed it when I returned to Los Angeles and then Berlin. Everybody is much better off in these places, there is not poverty like in Cuba, but everybody complains about things.
Wim Wenders
#93. The stunning thing about the world as it is, is that we have a tremendously large problem in it: namely, one-third of all human deaths, 80-million every year from poverty-related causes, trivial diseases and so on, and stunningly, nobody is really paying attention to it.
Thomas Pogge
#94. Rather than being about money or material possessions as such, poverty is about the inability to participate actively in society.
Peter Townsend
#95. Poverty is fundamentally about a lack of cash. It's not about stupidity," stresses
Rutger Bregman
#96. There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs. Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don't.
Steven Soderbergh
#97. What does fighting crime mean, exactly? Does it mean upholding the law when a woman shoplifts to feed her children, or does it mean struggling to uncover the ones who, quite legally, have brought about her poverty?
Alan Moore
#98. A doctrine of class war seemed to provide a solution to the problem of poverty to people who know nothing about how wealth is created.
Jeane Kirkpatrick
#99. All you have to do [to win a Pulitzer Prize] is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.
David Baldacci
#100. Is globalization about 'the eradication of world poverty,' or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?
Arundhati Roy
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