Quotes About Poverty

#1. Development is a fundamental part of our national security. It is extreme poverty- the realities of access to water and food- which create the long-term drivers of our insecurity. Most wars are fought over scarce resources and that is going to accelerate in the future.

Rajiv Shah

#2. Poverty is not simply having no money - it is isolation, vulnerability, humiliation and mistrust ...

Megan Lee

#3. The biggest threat to authors in this age is not plagiarism or poverty, it's obscurity

Bernard Kelvin Clive

#4. Poverty is a giant who uses your features like a piece of cotton waste to wipe a filthy world.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine

#5. Many girls do not go to school because of poverty.

Malala Yousafzai

#6. If you believe that when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, then you believe that creating wealth causes poverty, and you're an idiot,

Michael Medved

#7. Poverty breeds a lot of things. When people are desperate and trying to survive, they do drastic things.

Damian Marley

#8. We always come back to the same vicious circle - an extreme degree of material or intellectual poverty does away with the means of alleviating it.

Simone De Beauvoir

#9. This intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape into the past.

Viktor E. Frankl

#10. Grant me the treasure of sublime poverty: permit the distinctive sign of our order to be that it does not possess anything of its own beneath the sun, for the glory of your name, and that it have no other patrimony than begging.

Francis Of Assisi

#11. If poverty defines greatness, then become the poorest person on earth, in terms of weakness and bigotry. And if wealth defines glory, then become the wealthiest person on earth, in terms of courage, confidence and reasoning.

Abhijit Naskar

#12. I think it depends on what agenda that female president brings. It's not good if that female president brings an agenda which is actually hostile to the cause of living wages. Women need equal wages to men, but not equal wages at poverty.

Jill Stein

#13. Better poetry than riches,
Better poverty than fortunes.

Stephan Attia

#14. I believe that the Welfare State redistributes poverty and reduces income. As Karl Kraus once said of psychoanalysis, the Welfare State is the disease which it purports to cure.

Arnold Kling

#15. Promoting education is an effort that is close to my heart. Illiteracy contributes to poverty; encouraging children to pick up a book is fundamental.

Sasha Grey

#16. It is inconceivable that poverty eradication can make much headway in the absence of major advances in literacy.

Koichiro Matsuura

#17. This must be a world of democracy and respect for human rights, a world freed from the horrors of poverty, hunger, deprivation and ignorance, relieved of the threat and the scourge of civil wars and external aggression and unburdened of the great tragedy of millions forced to become refugees.

Nelson Mandela

#18. If either wealth or poverty are come by honesty, there is no shame.

Confucius

#19. 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

#20. This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#21. 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

#22. Poverty can turn a person into a flaming torch for change and revolution, without which mankind would come to a standstill.

Jean Sasson

#23. We should not minimize the great outstanding service of Eugenics for critical and diagnostic investigations. It demonstrates ... that uncontrolled fertility is universally correlated with disease, poverty, overcrowding and the transmission of hereditable traits.

Margaret Sanger

#24. You know, Saudi Arabia has a lot of poverty also. Regardless about what you hear about the viceroy and people being rich, et cetera.

Al-Waleed Bin Talal

#25. There are wars and poverty and so on - it's based on fear. You can cure that with your being by not being afraid.

Ram Dass

#26. The possession of gold has ruined fewer men than the lack of it. What noble enterprises have been checked and what fine souls have been blighted in the gloom of poverty the world will never know.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

#27. The great doctors all got their education off dirt pavements and poverty - not marble floors and foundations.

Martin H. Fischer

#28. Rather than elevating poverty to a form of righteousness, Jesus is instead calling for a revolution of imagination around the nature of what we consider true blessing.

Jamie Arpin-Ricci

#29. Show the world that your God is worth ten thousand worlds to you. Show rich men how rich you are in your poverty when the Lord God is your helper. Show the strong man how strong you are in your weakness when underneath you are the everlasting arms.

Charles Spurgeon

#30. If you look to the downtrodden and wonder why they can't pull themselves out of poverty and get a nice job like you, you are committing the just-world fallacy. You are ignoring the unearned blessings of your station.

David McRaney

#31. Poverty would always exist when we allow injustices to speak.

Henry Johnson Jr

#32. I do not want to speak about overpopulation or birth control, but I think education is the way to give new impetus to the poverty question.

Harri Holkeri

#33. As long as women are bound by poverty and as long as they are looked down upon, human rights will lack substance.

Nelson Mandela

#34. Almsgiving tends to perpetuate poverty; aid does away with it once and for all

Evita Peron

#35. at rude variance with the poverty of its surroundings.

Dennis Carey

#36. It's more work to create poverty, disease and disharmony than it is to create health, harmony and abundance, because perfect health, harmony and abundance are the natural order of things.

Robert Anthony

#37. Poverty is a virtue which one can teach oneself.

Diogenes Of Sinope

#38. Poverty is not only a lack of money, it's a lack of sense of meaning.

David Bornstein

#39. I have committed my life to helping the poor, and I believe that if more companies followed Wal-Mart's lead in providing opportunity and savings to those who need it most, more Americans battling poverty would realize the American dream.

Andrew Young

#40. Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike. To understand poverty, I needed to understand that relationship. This sent me searching for a process that bound poor and rich people together in mutual dependence and struggle. Eviction was such a process.

Matthew Desmond

#41. It's as if we live in a house which has a vast treasury in one of its rooms. Only we've forgotten about it. So, instead of living a life of royalty, we go about in poverty.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

#42. Never before has man had such a great capacity to control his own environment, to end hunger, poverty and disease, to banish illiteracy and human misery. We have the power to make the best generation of mankind in the history of the world.

John F. Kennedy

#43. The crime should be punished no matter whether poverty or wealth caused it to occur, because the crime is wrong.

Ernest Van Den Haag

#44. Poverty only tries men's souls. It is loneliness that breaks the heart.

Sam Rayburn

#45. Being unemployed is even more disastrous for individuals than you'd expect. Aside from the obvious harm - poverty, difficulty paying off debts - it seems to directly affect people's health, particularly that of older workers.

James Surowiecki

#46. Poverty is much more than a way of life," Jack later wrote. "It goes much farther than skin-deep. It's no tattoo that fades with time. Nor a brand that can be put out of mind except when faced. Poverty, if you've known it, is you.

Gerald Clarke

#47. Poverty, like obesity, has the tendency to add at least ten years to the appearance of its victims, especially those who are over the age of twenty.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#48. Houdini connected to people on an emotional level so that when he would escape that straight jacket it wasn't about the straight jacket. It was about people looking at it and escaping poverty. When you have that it's the truest form of magic.

Criss Angel

#49. 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

#50. I did whatever it takes to do stand-up. There is an abundance of material in struggling and poverty and trying to make it. There is so much humor in that, it's unlimited.

Dat Phan

#51. Now, more than ever, we need to connect the dots between climate, poverty, energy, food and water. These issues cannot be addressed in isolation.

Ban Ki-moon

#52. To deal with these problems - of world population and hunger, of peace, of energy and mineral resources, of environmental pollution, of poverty - we must broaden and deepen our knowledge of nature's laws, and we must broaden and deepen our understanding of the laws of human behavior.

Herbert A. Simon

#53. your poverty is serving no one. If you're a charitable person, you'd be a whole lot more charitable if you had lots of money.

Napoleon Hill

#54. It's not viable' for poverty stricken developing world to emulate prosperity of U.S.

Jerry Brown

#55. The handholds for hope are there for all of us but are made plainest to those in poverty, for whom survival actually depends on hope in their God.

Wess Stafford

#56. The greatest hardship of poverty is that it tends to make men ridiculous.

Juvenal

#57. In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.

George Bernard Shaw

#58. When you have a spiritual foundation, you look at poverty differently then.

Dennis Banks

#59. We believe that business is good because it creates value. It is ethical because it is based on voluntary exchange; it is noble because it can elevate our existence, and it is heroic because it lifts people out of poverty and creates prosperity.

John Mackey

#60. Learning maketh young men temperate, is the comfort of old age, standing for wealth with poverty, and serving as an ornament to riches.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#61. Child labor perpetuates poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, population growth, and other social problems.

Kailash Satyarthi

#62. Ambition without pious restraint must end in failure, often involving in its ruin that beautiful reverence which solaces common men for the obscurity and poverty of their lot.

Russell Kirk

#63. Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.

Daniel M. Gilbert

#64. I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless, heartless, robots who protect them and their property.

Assata Shakur

#65. 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

#66. Let us all say together: "We want to build a green economy strong enough to life people out of poverty. We want to create green pathways out of poverty and into great careers for America's children. We want this 'green wave' to life all boats. This country can save the polar bears and poor kids too.

Van Jones

#67. It's difficult to write about poverty in a way that doesn't feel cliched.

Jake Halpern

#68. Place-based initiatives can provide a useful framework to judge our progress in raising people out of poverty. They allow us to see whether or not a neighborhood is improving and its residents are living better.

Henry Cisneros

#69. How strange it is, that a fool or a knave, with riches, should be treated with more respect by the world, than a good man, or a wise man in poverty!

Ann Radcliffe

#70. What's been building since the 1980's is a new kind of social Darwinism that blames poverty and crime and the crisis of our youth on a breakdown of the family. That's what will last after this flurry on family values.

Stephanie Coontz

#71. Poverty is a bitter thing; but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral, and intellectual flabbiness, to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all vain pursuits-the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in itself.

Theodore Roosevelt

#72. The worst thing about poverty is not the actual living of it, but the shame of it.

Dolly Parton

#73. The intention of this way of life [voluntary simplicity] is not to dogmatically live with less. It's a more demanding intention of living with balance. This is a middle way that moves between the extremes of poverty and indulgence.

Duane Elgin

#74. Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Frederick Douglass

#75. Africa the continent is not just what we see on the news. It's ... not AIDS, and it's not just war and poverty. It's so much more. It's an abundant continent, and Botswana is an abundant place.

Jill Scott

#76. Ours is not a problem of the intellect but of spiritual poverty. That is why we need a Savior.

Ravi Zacharias

#77. The worst kind of shame is being ashamed of frugality or poverty.

Livy

#78. By seeing the problem of poverty merely in terms of assistance, we overlook that our enormous economic advantage is deeply tainted by how it accumulated over the course of one historical process that has devastated the societies and cultures of four continents.

Thomas Pogge

#79. Doom yourself to horrific climate change by burning all that carbon and releasing all that CO2. Or power down society, reducing total energy usage around the planet. One leads to ecological collapse. The other is a reversion, in many ways, to poverty.

Ramez Naam

#80. In the midst of poverty and want, Felix carried with pleasure to his sister the first little white flower that peeped out from beneath the snowy ground.

Mary Shelley

#81. We have not yet reached the goal but ... we shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty shall be banished from this nation.

Herbert Hoover

#82. Let us contemplate the humility of the Son of God born into poverty. Let us imitate him by sharing with those who are weak.

Pope Francis

#83. I'm a real person, and I'm angry. I'm trying to use this celebrity thing to get people some help. AIDS, poverty, racism - I want to be one of the hands that helps stop all that. I'll put it on my shoulders. I'll charge it to my account.

Jamie Foxx

#84. Relief, or redistribution of income, voluntary or coerced, is never the true solution of poverty, but at best a makeshift, which may mask the disease and mitigate the pain, but provides no basic cure.

Henry Hazlitt

#85. Far from the West having caused the poverty in the Third World, contact with the West has been the principal agent of material progress there.

Peter Thomas Bauer

#86. The difference between poverty and prosperity is the mindset of living out of necessity instead of possibility.

Farshad Asl

#87. If extreme poverty is allowed to increase, it will give rise to new problems, including new diseases that will spread from countries that cannot provide adequate healthcare to those that can. Poverty will lead to more migrants seeking to move, whether legally or not, to rich nations.

Peter Singer

#88. I do not prize the word cheap. It is not a word of inspiration. It is the badge of poverty, the signal of distress. Cheap merchandise means cheap men and cheap men mean a cheap country.

William McKinley

#89. Poor people who had escaped from poverty as I had, feared it, hated it and fled from it all their lives. Those born rich could afford to be touched by it.

Anzia Yezierska

#90. Worrying about bills, food, or other problems leaves less capacity to think ahead or to exert self-discipline. So, poverty imposes a mental tax.

Nicholas Kristof

#91. Mankind's greatest error, the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity.

Orhan Pamuk

#92. I would like to solemnly reaffirm, that poverty is not a fatality.

Mathieu Kerekou

#93. Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.

Malcolm Gladwell

#94. It is not a scientific proposition to determine that some cultures lack political power because they show nothing similar to what is found in our culture. It is instead the sign of a certain conceptual poverty.

Pierre Clastres

#95. The main cause of poverty or financial struggle is fear and ignorance, not the economy or the government or the rich.

Robert Kiyosaki

#96. There's an awful lot of white British kids who have never really gone hungry, always had a roof to live under but at the same time are desperately unhappy. It's not total poverty, just a poverty of ideas.

Richey Edwards

#97. Nobody wants to remain poor. Those who are poor want to move away from poverty. That is why, all our programmes must be for the poor. All our schemes must serve the poor.

Narendra Modi

#98. The issue I focus on the most is extreme poverty. I think it's kind of out of sight out of mind. I wish there would be more stories about that to connect people to what's happening. To personalize it, to make it real to people, to inspire them to action.

John Legend

#99. You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.

Milton Friedman

#100. The huge turnout for Live 8 here and around the world proves that thanks to the leadership from people like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown the world is beginning to demand more action on global health and poverty.

Bill Gates