Quotes About Poverty

#1. Politics, poverty, riches, etc - these are but backdrops for the grand cinema, the opera: the glory of your life. Sure, change the backdrops, make them better, but it is this inside-ness that matters most. Nothing else, at the last breath, matters, but your very own poetry. The glory of living.

Alex Ebert

#2. Why had he wanted to be rich, or to feel rich? Was he an unhappy mouse before? Didn't he see the King himself often looking sad? Was anyone completely happy?

William Steig

#3. Small leisure have the poor for grief.

John Greenleaf Whittier

#4. 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

#5. If we want to reduce poverty and misery, if we want to give to every deserving individual what is needed for a safe existence of an intelligent being, we want to provide more machinery, more power. Power is our mainstay, the primary source of our many-sided energies.

Nikola Tesla

#6. Poverty is on the increase - due to welfare cuts - and demand for food banks has rocketed.

Nicola Sturgeon

#7. When people grow up in atmospheres of violence or atmospheres of poverty, they don't normally use hi-falutin' language to describe those things. They would describe some brutal event the same way we would describe getting a taxi or missing the bus.

Philipp Meyer

#8. The time will come when all people will view with horror light way in which society and its courts of law now take human life; and when that time comes, the way will be clear to device some better method of dealing with poverty and ignorance and their frequent byproducts, which we call crime.

Clarence Darrow

#9. Her gloves, as Razumihin noticed, were not merely shabby but had holes in them, and yet this evident poverty gave the two ladies an air of special dignity, which is always found in people who know how to wear poor clothes.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#10. There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.

Sherman Alexie

#11. 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

#12. Yes I graduated from high school. Welfare. Temporary work, please. What is my problem? I want to eat.

Alexis De Veaux

#13. Poverty and mistakes are setbacks but you should never allow them to make you give up on your dreams.

Timothy Pina

#14. 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

#15. We are asked to orient our "strategies" and "tactics" around poverty and material immiseration at a time when revolutionary sentiment is being generated by the banality of life under conditions of material abundance.

Murray Bookchin

#16. The world has also learned that economic growth, by itself, cannot close the gap between rich and poor.

Dalai Lama XIV

#17. There is no peace in poverty

Lisa Kleypas

#18. The devadasis have a multilayered story, a story in which poverty, deprivation and injustice against women is central - but what has happened to them is absolutely an outcome of imperialism and the impact of British rule in India.

Beeban Kidron

#19. After 'An Inconvenient Truth' came out, a lot of people came to me with their causes, and there are a lot - water, poverty, and so many, many more.

Lawrence Bender

#20. One ought not to encourage beggars, and yes, you are right, it is far better to donate to charities that address the causes of poverty rather than to him, a creature who is merely its symptom.

Mohsin Hamid

#21. Some live in poverty but with their honor; some live in wealth but with no honor! Some lives are respectable, some are disgraceful!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#22. A grateful person is rich in contentment. An ungrateful person suffers in the poverty of endless discontentment.

David A. Bednar

#23. I've experienced poverty and plenty, and there's a lesson to be learned when you're brought up in poverty.

S. Truett Cathy

#24. If we could just stop building up armies and things like that, we would have all the money we need for wildlife and poverty.

Jane Goodall

#25. While we fight poverty in the Gulf, we also have to fight poverty across America. We should begin by returning to a promise once kept and now broken: If you work full-time, you shouldn't have to raise your children in poverty.

John Edward

#26. Who then is free? the wise man who is lord over himself;
Whom neither poverty nor death, nor chains alarm; strong to withstand his passions and despise honors, and who is completely finished and rounded off in himself.

Horace

#27. Much later I realized that Russian people, because of the poverty and squalor of their lives, love to amuse themselves with sorrow--to play with it like children, and are seldom ashamed of being unhappy.

Maxim Gorky

#28. Paper is poverty, it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself.

Thomas Jefferson

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. Spirituality is like a thin-thin thread, that if delicately followed guides us from darkness to light; from poverty to abundance and from destruction to safety.

Bryant McGill

#32. I think in some ways it would make more sense to have as a poverty level a relative concept and say, the level of poverty is that level of income or that level of consumption below which 10 percent of the people now are.

Milton Friedman

#33. 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

#34. German businesspeople have invested a great deal in our country, and trade is flourishing. We want to speed up economic cooperation. Your country is a large, important provider of aid, and it has done a great deal to reduce the poverty of many Vietnamese.

Nguyen Minh Triet

#35. When the going gets tough: the poor close their eyes, the rich open their wallets.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#36. If any man, out of an humour, should turn all his Estate into Money, and keep it dead, he would soon be sensible of Poverty growing upon him, whilst he is eating out of the quick stock.

Dudley North

#37. Many overlook the fact that Jesus was homeless. He did not only teach the poor; He lived among them.

Dillon Burroughs

#38. Today they say that we are free, only to be chained in poverty.

Bob Marley

#39. 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

#40. Pride breakfasted with plenty, dined with poverty, and supped with infamy.

Benjamin Franklin

#41. Wealth makes the laws that poverty must obey.

Mason Cooley

#42. You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.

Bill Cosby

#43. We have weapons of mass destruction we have to address here at home. Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction. Homelessness is a weapon of mass destruction. Unemployment is a weapon of mass destruction.

Dennis Kucinich

#44. Ignorance, poverty, and greed must disappear so that light can prevail in all places.

Helen Keller

#45. it is hard to argue that housing is not a fundamental human need. Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country. The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.

Matthew Desmond

#46. 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

#47. Visit those who are sick, or who are in trouble, especially those whom God has made needy by age, or by other sickness, as the feeble, the blind, and the lame who are in poverty. These you shall relieve with your goods after your power and after their need, for thus biddeth the Gospel.

John Wycliffe

#48. The poor love life as passionately as the rich do. Perhaps more, for the effort it takes to cling to it.

Joan Thomas

#49. Most poverty is a lack of opportunity.

Adam LiVecchi

#50. Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.

Isaiah Berlin

#51. The oppressor is truly repressed. Their poverty is existential, often surrounded by an abundance of material goods. (Leonardo Boff, p. 179)

Mev Puleo

#52. Children, together with women, constitute 90 percent of all refugee populations on the planet as well as the vast majority of those living in absolute poverty: the 'feminization of poverty' means that children are poor, too, since most parenting is done by mothers.

Robin Morgan

#53. While Haiti has recently celebrated more than 200 years of independence from French colonial rule, the citizens of the island remain vulnerable to poverty, poor health, and political chaos.

Eliot Engel

#54. A man guilty of poverty easily believes himself suspected.

Samuel Johnson

#55. Such is the scale and depth of poverty in many parts of the world that it won't be ended overnight. That is why if, like me, you want to see an end to poverty, you need to be in it for the long haul.

Annie Lennox

#56. 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.

#57. I noticed, rich people never toss away their pennies in their driveways, middle-class always chuck them there, and stray dogs lick up what little pennies they find on poverty ground.

Anthony Liccione

#58. Be not among z drunkards [5] or among a gluttonous eaters of meat, 21 for the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty, and b slumber will clothe them with rags.

Anonymous

#59. There is direct correlation between a society lacking in artistic vision to lack of social conscience, i.e., crime, poverty, and senseless, violent atrocities, materialism.

Vanna Bonta

#60. But if one examines the fine shades of postwar Soviet poverty,

Masha Gessen

#61. Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently. What supports its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery.

Mark Twain

#62. A peculiarity of the American historical sensibility allows us to be proud of great-grandfathers (or even grandfathers) who lived in crushing poverty, while the poverty of a father is too close for comfort.

Patricia Hampl

#63. We know we cannot achieve our twin goals of ending poverty and boosting shared prosperity without ending poverty and creating equality for women and girls.

Sri Mulyani Indrawati

#64. Science can lift people out of poverty and cure disease. That, in turn, will reduce civil unrest.

Stephen Hawking

#65. Everything you see before you is the result of poverty. But how are things any better in the wealthy countries? They protect their own environments, but then shift the heavily polluting industries to the poorer nations.

Liu Cixin

#66. I'm not here to eliminate poverty, to eradicate disease, to put a stop to people abandoning babies. I'm just here to love.

Katie J. Davis

#67. God makes all chosen souls pass through a fearful time of poverty, misery, and nothingness. He desires to destroy in them gradually all the help and confidence they derive from themselves so that He may be their sole source of support, their confidence, their hope, their only resource.

Jean-Pierre De Caussade

#68. For those who have lived on the edge of poverty all their lives, the semblance of poverty affected by the affluent is both incomprehensible and insulting.

Lillian B. Rubin

#69. The forgotten world is made up primarily of the developing nations, where most of the people, comprising more than fifty percent of the total world population, live in poverty, with hunger as a constant companion and fear of famine a continual menace.

Norman Borlaug

#70. A Spendthrift.-He has not yet the poverty of the rich man who has counted all his treasure,-he squanders his spirit with the irrationalness of the spendthrift Nature.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#71. Real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind.

George Gilder

#72. Poverty urges us to do and suffer anything that we may escape from it, and so leads us away from virtue.

Horace

#73. Science is one of the comparative advantages of our knowledge-based economy, and focusing on our prowess in providing better tools to address diseases of poverty is one of the best forms of foreign aid.

Seth Berkley

#74. I remember my dad came from Ireland and Scotland, and so he carried with him the fear of poverty. So when I wanted to break loose, it kind of made him very nervous.

Robert Redford

#75. Chill penury weighs down the heart itself; and though it sometimes be endured with calmness, it is but the calmness of despair.

Anna Brownell Jameson

#76. Private enterprise is not as spectacular nor as easy to see as the socialist way of temporarily diffusing poverty by eating up the seed corn - the tools - which will increase poverty in the long run.

Raymond C. Hoiles

#77. I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty.

Gordon Parks

#78. There are no riches like the sweetness of content, nor poverty comparable to the want of patience.

Roger Chamberlain

#79. Poverty is a state of mind.

Rahul Gandhi

#80. There are worse things than poverty, though I can't for the moment remember what they are ...

Nancy Mitford

#81. We have to realize that this country in its private sector has been fighting the most successful war on poverty the world has seen for the last 200 years.

Ronald Reagan

#82. 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

#83. The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.

Michael Parenti

#84. If we see their (Navajo) lives and festivals as fantastic and our lives as ordinary, we come to writing with a sense of poverty. We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary.

Natalie Goldberg

#85. Seldom do people discern eloquence under a threadbare cloak

Juvenal

#86. Begin to build up confidence and joy in your own richness. That richness is the essence of generosity. It is the essence of resourcefulness ; that you can deal with whatever is available around you and not feel poverty stricken.

Chogyam Trungpa

#87. 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

#88. Parents here only view school as a way to avoid being illiterate. They don't see education as a way to change their future and help them out of poverty.

Dan Washburn

#89. Let me first say that I don't think the millennium target of cutting global poverty in half is an impossible or abstract target. I think it is a real and achievable goal.

Gro Harlem Brundtland

#90. I saw people rise out of poverty right in front of me ... It made me believe that the market was the most powerful tool for change that we could hope to have.

Paul Rice

#91. 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

#92. The debt-habit is the twin brother of poverty.

Theodore T. Munger

#93. When a man dies he clutches in his hands only that which he has given away during his lifetime.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#94. 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

#95. The country is filled with energetic and enterprising men, rendered desperate by being reduced from affluence to poverty through the vicissitudes of the times. They will give an impulse to smuggling unknown to the country heretofore.

John C. Calhoun

#96. Poverty is the great reality. That is why the artist seeks it.

Anais Nin

#97. In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.

Herbert Hoover

#98. Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents.

Louisa May Alcott

#99. In their poverty, the mentally handicapped reveal God to us and hold us close to the gospel.

Henri Nouwen

#100. What wonders does not wine! It discloses secrets; ratifies and confirms our hopes; thrusts the coward forth to battle; eases the anxious mind of its burden; instructs in arts. Whom has not a cheerful glass made eloquent! Whom not quite free and easy from pinching poverty!

Horace