Poverty Quotes

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

An important lever for sustained action in tackling poverty and reducing hunger is money.

~ Gro Harlem Brundtland

My father was a Presbyterian minister, working among the poor in West Virginia. He had taken what amounted to a vow of poverty when he accepted that call and so we never had much money.

~ James Green Somerville

There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs. Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don't.

~ Steven Soderbergh

Education can lift individuals out of poverty and into rewarding careers.

~ Christine Gregoire

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

Global poverty is a complex web of interlinked problems. There is no one 'silver bullet' that will solve global inequality. Multiple contributing factors must be tackled in parallel. Yes, education alone is unlikely to lead to employment without economic reform to address the demand side in much of the developing world.

~ Adam Braun

Think about it: Every educated person is not rich, but almost every education person has a job and a way out of poverty. So education is a fundamental solution to poverty.

~ Kathleen Blanco

One of the greatest obstacles to escaping poverty is the staggering cost of higher education.

~ Chris Van Hollen

Poverty does not cause violence and terrorism. Lack of education does not cause terrorism.

~ John O. Brennan

One of the over-riding things for many who grow up in poverty is the simple desire to escape. I think it was sort of obvious to me that escape had to be through education.

~ Mildred S. Dresselhaus

If you're one car accident away from poverty, you're on a high wire without a safety net. And that's a challenging proposition.

~ Thomas Perez

When we take our eyes off the whirl of day-to-day activity and concentrate on honoring Him and following in His way, we find a consistent peace that carries us through both plenty and poverty.

~ Charles Stanley

Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society.

~ Muhammad Yunus

Poverty is a relationship that involves a lot of folks, rich and poor alike. I was looking for something that brought a lot of different people in a room. Eviction does that, embroils landlords and tenants, lawyers and social workers.

~ Matthew Desmond

The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.

~ Henry Louis Gates

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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

Wealth brings with it refinement, the spirit of conservation, while poverty inspires adventurous ideas, the desire to change things, and has little care for life.

~ José Rizal

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

Grave security concerns can arise as a result of demographic trends, chronic poverty, economic inequality, environmental degradation, pandemic diseases, organized crime, repressive governance and other developments no state can control alone. Arms can't address such concerns.

~ Ban Ki-Moon

The planet's biggest problems have to do with sustainability, environmental decline, global poverty, disease, conflict and so forth. Really, they're all interconnected - it's one big problem, which is that the way we're doing things can't go on.

~ Alex Steffen

The trends that are shaping the twenty-first-century world embody both promise and peril. Globalization, for example, has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty while contributing to social fragmentation and a massive increase in inequality, not to mention serious environmental damage.

~ Klaus Schwab

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

To overcome poverty and the flaws of the economic crisis in our society, we need to envision our social life. We have to free our mind, imagine what has never happened before and write social fiction. We need to imagine things to make them happen. If you don't imagine, it will never happen.

~ Muhammad Yunus

The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty - and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction.

~ Sarah Churchwell

To say that any people are not fit for freedom, is to make poverty their choice, and to say they had rather be loaded with taxes than not.

~ Thomas Paine