Poverty Quotes

If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort.

~ Mark Fisher

Well, honey, it’s capitalism that brings out the meanness and greed,” says I. “Our founding fathers did a decent job of framing our democracy. They wrote the Constitution and added a Bill of Rights that intended for people of all classes to enjoy the freedoms the Constitution offers. But capitalism came along without a constitution or a bill of rights and the industrialists grabbed unrestricted power. The capitalists wrote their own ‘Declaration of Capitalism’.” — Mother Jones

~ Jerry Ash

You can't change things. That's life. Poor stays poor, rich says rich, and those two, they will never meet.

~ Antonia Michaelis

One of the great failings of the American education system (in our view) is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad.

~ Nicholas D. Kristof

The more you have, the more you are occupied, the less you give. But the less you have the more free you are. Poverty for us is a freedom. It is not mortification, a penance. It is joyful freedom. There is no television here, no this, no that. But we are perfectly happy.

~ Mother Teresa

Many skills, as every successful entrepreneur knows, cannot be taught in school. They require doing. Sometimes a life of doing. And where money-making is concerned, nothing compresses the time frame needed to leap from my-shit-just-sits-there-until-it-rains poverty to which-of-my-toilets-shall-I-use affluence like an apprenticeship with someone who already has the angles all figured out.

~ Mohsin Hamid

But then it is easy, too easy, to sermonize about the dangers of paternalism and the need to take responsibility for our own lives, from the comfort of our couch in our safe and sanitary home. Aren't we, those who live in the rich world, the constant beneficiaries of a paternalism now so thoroughly embedded into the system that we hardly notice it?

~ Abhijit V. Banerjee

Our possessions are not ours- God has given them to us to cultivate, that we may make them fruitful and profitable in His Service, and so doing we shall please Him.

~ Francis De Sales

World, they have taken the small children like butterflies and thrown them, beating their wings, into the fire--

~ Nelly Sachs

Before I was married, I thought the sound of bangles jangling on my forearms would be delightful. I looked forward to being able to wear bells around my ankles and silver necklaces around my neck, but not any more, not since I had learned what they represented for the man who gave them. A necklace was no prettier than a piece of of rope that ties a goat to a tree, depriving it of freedom.

~ Phoolan Devi

The dilemma is, in the United States, each penniless citizen believes that, with luck, he might become a millionaire; and so doesn't want to put restraints on robber barons-he might become one one day!

~ Joyce Carol Oates

Be patient, you are in good company. Our Lord Himself, our Lady, the apostles, and countless saints, both men and women, have been poor.

~ Francis De Sales

People of civilized countenance made much of exposing the soft underbellies of their psyche - effete and sensitive were the brands of finer breeding. It was easy for them, safe, and that was the whole point, after all: a statement of coddled opulence that burned the throats of the poor more than any ostentatious show of wealth.

~ Steven Erikson

Misery and poverty of a nation is associated with the conscious of its people not leaders.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

Everyday 25,000 people die from poverty and hunger. And we have forgotten that they are also human.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

May we show great concern to those of great concern to God.

~ Dillon Burroughs

The poor are not a problem but rather an opportunity to show unconditional love.

~ Dillon Burroughs

I heard the voice of that bird, son of Polypas, whose piercing outcryand whose arrival announces to men the season when fieldsare plowed, and the voice of her broke the heart that darkens within me,since other men posess my flourishing acres now,and not for me are the mules dragging the plow through the grainland,since I have given my heart to the restless seafarer's life.

~ Theognis

Through silent alleys where dark shadows fleeted past them like forest beasts on the prowl; through bustling market-places where bloaters predominated, into crammed gin-palaces where the gas flashed over faces whereon was stamped the indelible impression of a protest against creation; brushing tatters which were in gruesome harmony with the haggard or bloated features.(The Phantom Model

~ Hume Nisbet

Anyone can take a picture of poverty; it’s easy to focus on the dirt and hurt of the poor. It’s much harder—and much more needful—to pry under that dirt and reveal the beauty and dignity of people that, but for their birth into a place and circumstance different from our own, are just like ourselves. I want my images to tell the story of those people and to move us beyond pity to justice and mercy.

~ David Duchemin

So let us be clear about this up front: We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women's power as economic catalysts. That is the process under way - not a drama of victimization but of empowerment, the kind that transforms bubbly teenage girls from brothel slaves into successful businesswomen.This is a story of transformation. It is change that is already taking place, and change that can accelerate if you'll just open your heart and join in.

~ Nicholas D. Kristof

Poverty was not created by God. It is we who have caused it, you and I through our egotism.

~ Mother Teresa

The real question is: How sturdy and solid is the floor our civilization stands on? How many lives with no prospects, shattered and senseless, can it bear the weight of before it cracks somewhere or other, splits at the joints?

~ Christa Wolf

Inevitably, people tell me that poor folks are lazy or unintelligent, that they are somehow deserving of their poverty. However, if you begin to look at the sociological literature on poverty, a more complex picture emerges. Poverty and unemployment are part and parcel of our economic order. Without them, capitalism would cease to function effectively, and in order to continue to function, the system itself must produce poverty and an army of underemployed or unemployed people.

~ Bob Torres

The Rooster Coop was doing its work. Servants have to keep other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters or entrepreneurs. The coop is guarded from the inside.

~ Aravind Adiga

I've never heard anyone come back from downtown Baltimore waxing poetic about the authenticity of poverty.

~ Lisa Samson

A beautiful death is for people who lived like animals to die like angels—loved and wanted.

~ Mother Teresa

Thus God's work and His eyes are in the depths, but man's only in the height.

~ Martin Luther

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

The wilderness was the testing ground—the deciding place. It was a place of God revealing himself in a whole new and deeper way. Would his people trust him completely, confident in his goodness, wisdom, and power? Those who believed God to be who he said he was moved on into the promised land; many did not.

~ Amy Layne Litzelman

My honey child, them housing projects Cannot contain her multitudes A sunbeam, hard upon her Just a fly strugglin’ through her braid loops Watch me prove to ‘em I’m more than nothin’ But a ragamuffin with homesick eyes Yes, when it gets to be the same old thing Shorty you ought to come and see about me My love, she is a drummer Than industrial steel, her backbone tougher The eloping night and the honey moon that trails Just dirt ‘neath her finger nails I’ll be down on them crossroads ‘Til daybreak winks a bright eye And if it gets to be the same old thing Shorty you ought to come and see about me She’s heard all the right things And they did not persuade her She has no use for your words What she wants is your labor ‘Cause when gringos speak of minorities They tend to keep their voices low Ah, but when that gets to be the same old thing Shorty you ought to come and see about me

~ Valentine Xavier

Poverty, for me, is synonymous with degradation.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Do you find yourself in a dry place today? Don’t look back toward the land of your bondage, or even to the place where God miraculously saved you from your enemies. Those seasons are over and he is now offering you a great opportunity. He is longing to reveal his sovereignty to you by providing for you in this most hot and dry place.

~ Amy Layne Litzelman

Measured in terms of the World Bank poverty standard, the number of poor people in China fell from 652 million to 135 million between 1981 and 2004 - in other words, more than half a billion people were lifted out of poverty. The number of poor people in the developing world as a whole declined by only 400 million over the same period. In other words, but for China, there would have been an increase in the number of poor people in the developing world. No wonder a World Bank report said that a fall in the number of poor of this magnitude over such a short period is without historical precedent.

~ Wang Shaoguang

You can find Calcutta anywhere in the world. You only need two eyes to see. Everywhere in the world there are people that are not loved, people that are not wanted nor desired, people that no one will help, people that are pushed away or forgotten. And this is the greatest poverty.

~ Mother Teresa

It is also in the interests of the tyrant to make his subjects poor... the people are so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for plotting.

~ Aristotle

Those with the money are eccentric. Those without, insane.

~ Bruce Robinson

We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won

~ Ronald Reagan

We must arm ourselves with patience and wisdom and listen to the poor what they want. This is the best way to avoid the trap of ignorance, ideology and inertia on our side.

~ Abhijit V. Banerjee

Alone, human beings can feel hunger. Alone, we can feel cold. Alone, we can feel pain. To feel poor, however, is something we do only in comparison to others.

~ Eric Greitens