Top 100 Poverty's Quotes
#2. Poverty's no sin, we mustn't omit to point that out.' This also turned out to be true: the fair-haired young man admitted it at once, and with unexpected haste.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#3. Poverty's potential for character building is far overrated.
Steve Perry
#4. Poverty's a chilly theme," he said; "let's take something to warm us before we go on with the variations.
John Meade Falkner
#5. To close the eyes, and give a seemly comfort to the apparel of the dead, is poverty's holiest touch of nature.
Charles Dickens
#6. It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most.
It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.
This is the tragic accent of the scene.
Wallace Stevens
#7. Poverty's simplicity has an inexpensive beauty rooted in it, which the rich can never afford to buy
Munia Khan
#8. Poverty's child -
he starts to grind the rice,
and gazes at the moon.
Matsuo Basho
#9. If you like old cars detective, eastern North Carolina is perfect for you" he said smoothing his tie. "We have oodles of vintage vehicles around here, don't we Colonel? In fact I like to think of them as one of poverty's little perks.
Sheila Turnage
#10. The truth is, poverty's the environment for alcoholism, and the reservations aren't rich. Maybe cleaning people up in fiction is just as dangerous as presenting them unfiltered.
Stephen Graham Jones
#11. All the Utopias - Brook Farm, Robert Owen's sanctuary of chatter, Upton Sinclair's Helicon Hall - and their regulation end in scandal, feuds, poverty, griminess, disillusion.
Sinclair Lewis
#12. Thinking about the world writ large, I am more optimistic than not that we will tackle our most pressing challenges, whether poverty or equality for women and girls or climate change; but I also know we'll only tackle them if people are really informed about the challenge and what's proven to work.
Chelsea Clinton
#13. I've experienced poverty and plenty, and there's a lesson to be learned when you're brought up in poverty.
S. Truett Cathy
#14. It's odd that the people who worry whether certain plays are "morally offensive" so rarely worry about the moral offensiveness of war, poverty, bigotry.
Sydney J. Harris
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to hell.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#18. Unhappiness doesn't grow on the chest like leprosy. Poverty won't fall off the roof like a loose tile, no; poverty and unhappiness are man's doing.
Bertolt Brecht
#19. I believe one reason that God allows poverty and suffering is so that His followers may demonstrate Christ's love, mercy, and comfort to [others].
Billy Graham
#20. Every day you make a choice either to sow some of your seed or to eat it. When you exercise faith and sow, you release God's law of prosperity. When you give in to your fear and eat your seed, or hide it, you release God's law of poverty.
John Avanzini
#21. The people are suffering. Relieving people's poverty ought to be handled as though one were rescuing them from fire, or saving them from drowning. One cannot hesitate.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#22. I didn't want to hear the usual answers about what's wrong because I believe these are symptoms: global warming, genocide, hunger, poverty, war, environmental crisis. If we can identify the root cause, we can change our ways.
Tom Shadyac
#23. Strangely, the greater the debilitating toll poverty takes on the lives of America's schoolchildren, the more taboo discussions of poverty have become.
Linsey McGoey
#25. It's just cheaper to be White in America than it is to be Black, because of educational advances, because of the police incidents, because of the poverty we grow up in as African-Americans. So, it's just cheaper in this country if you're born a Caucasian than being born a Black person.
Warren Ballentine
#26. God's Word teaches a very hard, disturbing truth. Those who neglect the poor and the oppressed are really not God's people at all - no matter how frequently they practice their religious rituals nor how orthodox are their creeds and confessions.
Ronald J. Sider
#28. Poverty places not just one or two obstacles but multiple obstacles in a child's pathway to what we would consider to be regular development - cognitively, intellectually and emotionally.
Geoffrey Canada
#29. Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he's far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can't afford self-doubt and he can't let other people's opinions, even a father's, keep him from writing.
Wallace Stegner
#30. I start to think, 'It's awful being too poor to even buy my own dress for homecoming.' But that's instantly swept away by another thought: 'I'm so lucky that someone cates enough to loan me a dress.
Margaret Peterson Haddix
#31. Workers on the edge of poverty are essential to America's prosperity, but their well-being is not treated as an integral part of the whole. Instead, the forgotten wage a daily struggle to keep themselves from falling over the cliff. It is time to be ashamed.
David K. Shipler
#32. Imperialism and exploitation," he wrote, "spheres of influence, trade barriers, unequal distribution of the world's goods, starvation in the midst of plenty, slums with gold coasts next door, poverty supporting luxury: These are marks of an unChristian world.
Sara Miles
#33. The crisis in America that we barely notice anymore is that we've become two nations - divided by poverty, opportunity, and race. It's like a neighbor's car alarm that we don't hear anymore because it rings so often.
Arianna Huffington
#34. Poverty alleviation occurs when the power of Christ's resurrection reconciles our key relationships through the transformation of both individual lives and local, national, and international systems.
Brian Fikkert
#35. Boosting education will be a direct counterbalance to Boko Haram's appeal. In particular we must educate more young girls, ensuring they will grow up to be empowered through learning to play their full part as citizens of Nigeria and pull themselves up and out of poverty.
Muhammadu Buhari
#36. It's your obligation to speak the truth, and everyone can either take it or leave it. But truth must be in us. We live in such a poverty of truth today.
Mother Angelica
#37. Precisely where I feel my poverty is where I discover God's blessing.
Henri Nouwen
#38. God's people are not to accumulate stuff for tomorrow but to share indiscriminately with the scandalous and holy confidence that God will provide for tomorrow. Then we need not stockpile stuff in barns or a 401(k), especially when there is someone in need.
Shane Claiborne
#39. Americans lack any deeper appreciation of class. Beyond white anger and ignorance is a far more complicated history of class identity that dates back to America's colonial period and British notions of poverty.
Nancy Isenberg
#40. There is a solitude in poverty, but a solitude that gives everything back its value. At a certain level of wealth, the heavens themselves and the star-filled night are nature's riches.
Albert Camus
#41. There is nothing like widespread poverty to boost a country's equality index.
Bob Tyrrell
#42. Nothing is 'wrong' with me, Dan. What's wrong with you? she said in the same eerily quiet voice, dark eyes fixated on Dan, as she breathed heavily.
Martin Hopkins
#43. I am furious at the way that we have allowed money to subvert our democracy. I am appalled at the way that the U.S., a very wealthy nation, permits and even encourages a level of poverty that other wealthy nations would not even consider.
Alex Gibney
#44. We can't end poverty if we fail to save the lives of our world's mothers.
Liya Kebede
#45. Until it's understood to involve justice for those in poverty, a future for generations yet unborn, and a commitment to the rest of creation, it's unlikely we'll be able to overcome the status quo.
Bill McKibben
#46. I think the English are bipolar. 'We're the greatest, no we're terrible' - that's a constant English struggle. Crime is down, there's little poverty - yet it's always the worst time to have lived here.
Dara O Briain
#47. The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money ... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
Alan Watts
#48. We have common enemies today. It's called childhood poverty. It's called cancer. It's called AIDS. It's called Parkinson's. It's called Muscular Dystrophy.
Jerry Doyle
#49. People ask, "Why is there poverty in the world?" It's a silly question. Poverty is the default human condition. It is the factory preset of this mortal coil.
Jonah Goldberg
#50. We may believe in the state's responsibility to alleviate the crushing poverty that afflicts 40 percent of Latin America's population, but most of us also affirm that there is no better cure for that poverty than a stronger, more globally integrated economy.
Oscar Arias
#51. I made a decision that whether or not I was going to make under the national poverty level wasn't going to play a part in whether or not I was an actor. That's what I do.
Don Johnson
#52. The merits of deeper debt cancellation, when accompanied by conditions of accountability and transparency on the part of recipient countries, have been shown to generate much needed resources for health, education and poverty reduction for some of the world's poorest people.
John Ricard
#53. The fruit of love's great tree is poverty; Whoever knows this knows humility.
Farid Al-Din Attar
#54. 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
#55. There are still hundreds of millions, billions of people living in abject poverty around the world. They need electricity. They need electricity they can count on, that they can afford. They need fuel to cook their food on that's not animal dung.
Rex Tillerson
#56. I've seen it around the world, in the poorest countries and in countries riven with conflict, It is women who are the key to breaking out of poverty, breaking out of stagnation. It's women who can contribute to achieving real security - not bombs and bullets and repressive governments.
Queen Noor Of Jordan
#57. Every time there has been an effort by the Haitian people to overcome the misery and poverty that comes from 200 years of bitter attacks, really bitter, the U.S. steps in and blocks it.
Noam Chomsky
#58. The issue of the environment as seen by Pope Francis is not a matter of purely scientific or, indeed, theological debate: it involves economic and political views on how the world's poor can be brought out of poverty while protecting the environment.
John Cornwell
#59. A poor man in this world can be done to death in two main ways, by the absolute indifference of his fellows in peacetime or by their homicidal mania when there's a war.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#60. The press is dying to paint me as now trying to undo the New Deal. I remind them I voted for F.D.R. 4 times. I'm trying to undo the "Great Society." It was L.B.J.'s war on poverty that led to our present mess.
Ronald Reagan
#61. Not to understand a treasure's worth till time has stole away the slighted good, is cause of half the poverty we feel, and makes the world the wilderness it is.
William Cowper
#62. I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man's housekeeper. When I was young, if a girl married poverty, she became a drudge; if she married wealth, she became a doll. Had I married at twenty-one, I would have been either a drudge or a doll for fifty-five years. Think of it!
Susan B. Anthony
#63. if one can surmount poverty and can love in moderation, there is no obstacle to happiness for anyone.
Pearl S. Buck
#64. The greatest poverty one can have is to be poor in one's heart and for falling in love, he is truly happy. He discovers purpose.
Russell Brand
#65. As we come to know the seriousness of the situation, the war, the racism, the poverty in our world, we come to realize that things will not be changed simply by words or demonstrations. Rather, it's a question of living one's life in a drastically different way.
Dorothy Day
#66. It's sad to see the world live in ignorance full of pain only enjoyed luxuriously by the few stupid greedy ones.
Auliq Ice
#67. There is an extent of riches, as well as an extreme of poverty, which, by harrowing the circles of a man's acquaintance, lessens his opportunities of general knowledge.
Howard Zinn
#68. 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
#69. So when we're really addressing issues like poverty, you can't do that without addressing the real driver of some of those, which is stable homes, families. So that's why to me those issues are important. They're not frivolous. They're critical economic issues.
Mike Huckabee
#70. A man will seek to express his relation to the stars; but when a man's consciousness has been riveted upon obtaining a loaf of bread, that loaf of bread is as important as the stars.
Richard Wright
#71. It's not easy to be optimistic and hopeful after you come to know and love some of the young victims of sexual abuse, violence, poverty, neglect, drugs, and rape. It's taking me a while to climb out of this hatred, this noxious cynicism. I'm doing my best.
M.T. Johnson
#72. The richness of God's Word ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#73. Let's take care of the necessities first: give people jobs, and find a way to get us out of poverty.
Eartha Kitt
#74. Money is only a vehicle that provides you with options, and I say there's only one thing that money can't buy - poverty.
Jerry Doyle
#75. We have mistaken the nature of poverty, and thought it was economic poverty. No, it is poverty of soul, deprivation of God's recreating, loving peace.
Thomas R. Kelly
#76. Rarely they rise by virtue's aid who lie plunged in the depth of helpless poverty.
Juvenal
#77. When someone can't afford to wear shoes, it's not just about them not having shoes on that day. It's about a cycle of poverty that exists within their community.
Michael Franti
#78. We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra ...
Chuck Palahniuk
#79. The seven deadly sins ... food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.
George Bernard Shaw
#81. We got rid of colonialism, we got rid of slavery, and we got rid of apartheid everyone thought each one of them was impossible. Let's take the next impossible, do it with joy and get it finished with and create a world free from poverty. Let us create the world of our choice.
Muhammad Yunus
#82. Rather than dividing the world between good and evil, the Left divided the world in terms of economics. Economic classes, not moral values, explained human behavior. Therefore, to cite a common example, poverty, not one's moral value system, or lack of it, caused crime.
Dennis Prager
#83. Liberalism, above all, means emancipation - emancipation from one's fears, his inadequacies, from prejudice, from discrimination, from poverty.
Hubert H. Humphrey
#84. America must remain freedom's staunchest friend, for freedom is our best ally and it is the world's only hope to conquer poverty and preserve peace.
Ronald Reagan
#85. Social justice has to do with issues such as poverty, inequality, war, racism, sexism, abortion, and lack of concern for ecology because what lies at the root at each of these is not so much someone's private sin but rather a huge, blind system that is inherently unfair.
Ronald Rolheiser
#86. We give violent movies a pass but come down hard on a rapper like Scarface, who is ultimately a storyteller just like Brian de Palma. And neither of them is responsible for the poverty and violence that really do shape people's lives
not to mention their individual choices.
Jay-Z
#87. My dad's main client was the World Bank, and he spent most of his time traveling to Third World countries. His particular interest lay in the eradication of poverty through development and business.
Hugh Jackman
#88. 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
#89. The worker picked up Pakhom's spade, dug a grave, and buried him - six feet from head to heel, exactly the amount of land a man needs.
Leo Tolstoy
#91. I am so proud to be from New Orleans and to be one of those people who had been displaced. I wasn't there during that time, but that's where I come from, that kind of poverty, and I'm very, very proud of that because it's given me my history.
Tyler Perry
#92. The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDs, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of those wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead - everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real.
Bruce Jackson
#93. Poverty is a career for lot's of well paid people
Ronald Reagan
#94. The way that a handful of corporations in Los Angeles dictate how our stories are told creates a real poverty of imagination and it's a big problem.
Alex Cox
#95. You are destined to reign in life. You are called by the Lord to be a success, to enjoy wealth, to enjoy health, and to enjoy a life of victory. It is not the Lord's desire that you live a life of defeat, poverty, and failure.
Joseph Prince
#96. How the sting of poverty, or small means, is gone when one keeps house for one's own comfort and not for the comfort of one's neighbors.
Dinah Maria Mulock
#97. Poverty, disease, sorrow, imprisonment and other evils are the fruits borne by the tree of one's own sins.
Chanakya
#98. It is not the high summer alone that is God's. The winter also is His. And into His winter He came to visit us. And all man's winters are His - the winter of our poverty, the winter of our sorrow, the winter of our unhappiness - even 'the winter of our discontent.
George MacDonald
#99. Let no man's place, or dignity, or riches, puff him up; and let no man's low condition or poverty abase him. For the chief points are faith towards God, hope towards Christ, the enjoyment of those good things for which we look, and love towards God and our neighbor.
Ignatius Of Antioch
#100. The lowest of the low-poverty countries manage to get along in the world with similar levels of single mother parenting just fine. . . . We plunge more than 1 in 5 of our nation's children into poverty because we choose to.
Rebecca Traister
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