Quotes About Poverty In America

#1. Social Security is meant to be - to make sure that no one who's worked hard and played by the rules and paid into the system grows old in poverty in America.

Chris Christie

#2. Poverty in America today leads not only to anxiety, unhappiness, discomfort and a lack of material goods. It leads to death. Poverty in America today is a death sentence for tens and tens of thousands of our people.

Bernie Sanders

#3. The greatest poverty in America today is time poverty. People have money, but they don't have time.

Brian Tracy

#4. My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right.

James McBride

#5. We are actually a very rich country with a lot of resources and the ability to do almost whatever we want. We could eliminate poverty in America by spending a fraction of what we spend on defense.

Alex Pareene

#6. Is everything forbidden us except to fold our arms? Poverty is not written in the stars; under development is not one of God's mysterious designs.

Eduardo Galeano

#7. They didn't need to be specifically South American or Latin American. Instead we discovered we were talking about human beings in general. We realized that these are not issues only pertinent to Latin America: poverty, misery, consumerism, etc.

Alex Abreu

#8. America has a critical place to play in the end of extreme poverty.

Hugh Evans

#9. Hillary Clinton understands that if someone in America this country works 40 hours a week, that person should not be living in poverty. She understands that we must raise the minimum wage to a living wage.

Bernie Sanders

#10. We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before.

Herbert Hoover

#11. Poverty continues to exist. Its appearance seems to be relentless in evidencing itself not only to all the things we experience here in America, but certainly what we see globally. And I don't see anywhere any philosophical analysis that suggests we know how to get out of this.

Harry Belafonte

#12. Brazil has a lot of issues that are similar to a lot of countries in Latin America, but the dominant issue Brazil is dealing with is poverty and political corruption.

Morena Baccarin

#13. In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilization.

Oscar Wilde

#14. It was easier to deal with poverty and death in India that the lack of spirituality in America.

Mother Teresa

#15. I'm very familiar with poverty. I find it easy to be with, whether I'm in America or in Africa or in Asia. Wherever I go and find the environment of those who are living in poverty and resisting poverty is a great in which I have great comfort.

Harry Belafonte

#16. We've always had a tradition in America of hounding our artists to death. Look at the list of our great artists, you see a continual history of defeat, frustration, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction. The best poets of my generation are all suicides.

James Dickey

#17. The "discovery" of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the "discovery" of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#18. Poor people in America today (people who are officially in poverty) have a higher standard of living - in terms of medical standards, in terms of going to college, in terms of the way people live - than middle class people did thirty years ago.

Michael Medved

#19. Today, the majority of poor renting families in America spend over half of their income on housing, and at least one in four dedicates over 70 percent to paying the rent and keeping the lights on.

Matthew Desmond

#20. We have a presidential nominee in Hillary Clinton who knows that, in a time of stunningly wide disparities of wealth in our nation, America's greatness must not be measured by how many millionaires and billionaires we have, but by how few people we have living in poverty.

Cory Booker

#21. Well, we in America are about to break up with oil. Why not break up with poverty and discrimination too?

Van Jones

#22. Before Social Security existed, about half of America's senior citizens lived in poverty.

Bernie Sanders

#23. I contribute a large amount of money to the Southern Poverty Law Center, so I'm on their mailing list for all their Klan Watch newsletters. I'm very well aware of White Power movements in America.

Henry Rollins

#24. Most poor people in America were like Arleen: they did not live in public housing or apartments subsidized by vouchers. Three in four families who qualified for assistance received nothing.

Matthew Desmond

#25. I am against all kinds of oppression. Poverty, Sexism, racism, terrorism, classicism, imperialism, heterosexism, Cisgenderism, colorism, Ableism, and Nativism. Because it hinder human progression.

Henry Johnson Jr

#26. I am convinced that all this poverty in Mexico and in Latin America, like it's happening in China is the opportunity to grow. It's an opportunity for investment; it's an economic activity and to take out poverty is the best investment any person or a person can do in any place.

Carlos Slim

#27. Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#28. I think of what it means to be a teenager in America, necessarily pushing boundaries, making expected mistakes. Here there is no margin for error: a mistake, no matter how insignificant, dashes any small hopes to break the cycle of poverty. Here in Kibera the world is relentless and unforgiving.

Jessica Posner

#29. 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

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

Herbert Hoover

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.

Matthew Desmond

#36. In America, the problems of poverty and low income, particularly for minorities, are disproportionately focused in the inner cities. Shining a spotlight on the businesses growing in these communities is proof that any community has the potential for entrepreneurship.

Michael Porter

#37. In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#38. People who work full-time in America should not have to live in poverty - simple as that. Too many jobs don't pay enough to get by, let alone get ahead. Too many people are finding the rungs on the ladder of opportunity further and further apart.

Thomas Perez

#39. More people are killed by stray bullets every day in America than have been killed by Ebola here. More are dying because of poverty and hunger.

Robert Reich

#40. The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret. Every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth.

Eduardo Galeano

#41. As a result of the current universal benefit, the poverty rate for seniors in America is about 10%. Without the universal benefit, it would be over 50%.

Steve Israel

#42. Poverty in western Mexico is an Unconditional Sentence.

Warren Eyster

#43. The reality is that capital punishment in America is a lottery. It is a punishment that is shaped by the constraints of poverty, race, geography and local politics.

Bryan Stevenson

#44. There are war-torn countries, people full of poverty, who still voted 60, 70 percent. If here in the United States of America, we voted at 60 percent, 70 percent, it would transform our politics.

Barack Obama

#45. And sometimes people don't realize that 90 percent of the persistent poverty counties are located in rural America.

Tom Vilsack

#46. In fact, every place I've been to in Africa has a nice part, but you see the downside. Calcutta , parts of Central and South America , I've seen a lot of dead bodies and a lot of sad poverty and just obliteration.

Henry Rollins

#47. Free trade will go a long way toward alleviating poverty in Central America. Yet trade alone is not enough.

Oscar Arias

#48. The levels of poverty in 1933's rural America were unimaginable to us now. The 1933 Farm Bill, which introduced unprecedented government control over agriculture, was a reaction to the specific problems facing producers at that time.

Debbie Stabenow

#49. America stands as a beacon of hope and the possibility of a better life - but it is also a nation where nearly 1 in 4 children live in poverty.

Chris Van Hollen

#50. While a handful of countries and a small number of people are leading ample life, dozens of countries and billions of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America are being left in absolute poverty.

Tran Duc Luong