Poverty Line Quotes

#1. It would take little more than $50 billion to raise every poor person above the official poverty line, yet the percentage of the population classified as poor hardly budges, while annual welfare spending amounts to four times that much. Where's the money going?

Robert Higgs

#2. My advice: Don't quit. When I got to New York City, I lived so far below the poverty line, because I didn't give in and get a job at 7-Eleven. I think you can thrive in misery.

Rob Zombie

#3. I think that America in general is piratical. Every time we accept a paycheck for doing almost nothing, allowing us to live above the poverty line, we're engaging in piracy.

Will Oldham

#4. My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack.

Elizabeth Warren

#5. It is shameful that millions of Americans are suffering the economic injustice of working a full-time job and earning a wage that leaves them below the poverty line.

Bill Pascrell

#6. Full-time workers earning the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 only earn about $14,500 a year in wages - below the poverty line for a family of two. That's unacceptable.

Thomas Perez

#7. Shyness is a luxury reserved for those who are above the poverty line. To a beggar, being shy is deadly.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#8. Behind the world's most difficult problems are people - groups of people who don't get along together. You can blame crime, war, drugs, greed, poverty, capitalism or the collective unconscious. The bottom line is that people cause our problems.

Zaid Hassan

#9. In 1958, my father invested everything he had in a business venture and became the largest automobile dealership in Chicago for Ford's new Edsel line. But Edsel sales plummeted and my father fell into bankruptcy. I watched him struggle; working long hours to protect us from poverty.

Radhanath Swami

#10. Yes, there's a higher rate of people living below the poverty line who aren't vaccinated. But it's much rarer for that to be a product of choice than a product of circumstance.

Eula Biss

#11. 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

#12. Inflation is taking up the poverty line, and poverty is not just economic but defined by way of health and education.

Azim Premji

#13. These Americans are among the working poor with full-time jobs earning $5.15 an hour. Millions fall into this boat, even more when you consider that the poverty line has not been adequately adjusted to reflect the true level of poverty in this country.

Marcy Kaptur

#14. I've still got family members living below the poverty line in New York.

Tracy Morgan

#15. Poverty is everyone's problem. It cuts across any line you can name: age, race, social, geographic or religious. Whether you are black or white; rich, middle-class or poor, we are ALL touched by poverty.

Kathleen Blanco

#16. Some people just don't want to put in the effort. I just show up and say some lines and I'm famous. Anyone living below the poverty line just needs to shape up or be shipped out, you know?

Zach Braff

#17. Lajwanti made the cardinal mistake of trying to cross the dividing line that separates the existence of the rich from that of the poor. She made the fatal error of dreaming beyond her means. The bigger the dream, the bigger the disappointment.

Vikas Swarup

#18. An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels it votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous indignation to the next.

Paul Valery

#19. And if you look at the reality in the United States, where you have more than 40 million people below the poverty line and 42 million on food stamps, and then you look at poverty around the world, clearly the way we're running the engine of capitalism is not serving us well.

Simon Mainwaring

#20. How well a posse policy will fare in a world with 3 billion people below the poverty line and nuclear warheads scattered around a dozen or more regions like melons in a field, is not easy to imagine.

Herbert Schiller

#21. The main environmental challenge of the 21st century is poverty. When you don't know where your next meal is coming from, it's hard to consider the environment 100 years down the line.

Bjorn Lomborg

#22. The poverty line is like the age of consent: if you find yourself parsing exactly where it is, you've probably already done something very, very wrong.

John Oliver

#23. At the current $5.15 an hour, the federal minimum wage has become a poverty wage. A full-time worker with one child lives below the official poverty line.

Bernie Sanders

#24. Since the day Martin Luther King was killed, the black middle classes have almost quadrupled, but the percentage of black children living on or below the poverty line is almost the same.

Henry Louis Gates

#25. While God has done his part in creating a world capable of providing what we need, we have not done our part in the stewardship of it, in seeing that it gets to the end of the line, to the poorest and neediest
the children.

Wess Stafford

#26. I lived below the official American poverty line until I was 31.

Dustin Hoffman

#27. Having stumbled upon a tolerable career, for the first time in my life I was actually living above the poverty line. My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up to something like happiness.

Jon Krakauer

#28. It's outrageous to line your pockets off the misery of the poor; It's outrageous, the crimes some human beings must endure ...

Paul Simon

#29. Even when I was living below the poverty line as a novelist, I was still living better than 99.5% of the human population of the world. But in my little, soft realm of trying to amuse a few dozen middle-class people with my books and articles, I did struggle to survive in my own way.

Jonathan Ames

#30. Co-opting the conservative line on anti-poverty programs did nothing to halt conservative attacks on anti-poverty programs.

Alex Pareene

#31. I grew up below the poverty line; I didn't have as much as other people did. I think it made me stronger as a person, it built my character. Now I have a 4.0 grade point average and I want to go to college, and just become a better person.

Justin Bieber