Poverty Quotes

I love living in the ghetto! #PoorMindSet

~ Habeeb Akande

He seems so frivolous and so careless, but he gives money to beggars, not frivolously or carelessly, but because he believes in giving money to beggars, and giving it to them “where they stand”.He says he knows perfectly well all the arguments against giving money to beggars. But he finds those to be precisely the arguments for giving money to them. If beggars are lazy or deceptive or wanting a drink, he knows only too well his own lack of motivation, his own dishonesty, his own thirst.He doesn’t believe in “scientific charity” because that is too easy, as easy as writing a check. He believes in “promiscuous charity” because that is really difficult. “It means the most dark and terrible of all human actions—talking to a man. In fact, I know of nothing more difficult than really talking to the poor men we meet.” (pp. 13-14)

~ Dale Ahlquist

Don’t let affluence make you impoverished of God.

~ Jon Bloom

Gail had a baby named Ned who was four months old, and a new look of baffled hurt, a left-behind sadness, like she saw that the great world kept spinning onward and away while she'd overnight become glued to her spot.

~ Daniel Woodrell

You'd be surprised how difficult it is to ask alms of a stranger when you've never done it before, what a psychological barrier separates the honest man from the panhandler. (Dusk To Dawn)

~ Cornell Woolrich

Believe me I do understand and I am disgusted by the idea that we should aim for any less for a child from a poor background than a rich one.

~ David Cameron

Ree Dolly stood at the break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. Carcasses hung pale of flesh with fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.

~ Daniel Woodrell

cross-national studies show that the U.S. poverty rate, which stands persistently above 12 percent, is not only the highest poverty rate of any advanced industrial nation, but is more than twice the average for that group.Pursuing the American Dream, 9, 276

~ Calvin C. Jillson

Greed applied is prosperity realized. ~R. Alan Woods [2006]

~ R. Alan Woods

I knew, of course, that I should be well paid for my services, but I would gladly have accepted half the sum I expected if I could have had it that night, for our little treasury was wholly exhausted, and we had not sixpence to purchase a breakfast for the following day. When the great hall door shut upon me, and I found myself on the pavement, with all the luxury and splendour on one side, and I and my desolation on the other, the contrast struck me cruelly, for I too, had been rich, and dwelt in illuminated palaces, and had a train of liveried servants at my command, and sweet music had echoed through my halls. I felt desperate, and drawing my hat over my eyes I began pacing the square, forming wild plans for the relief or escape from my misery. (The Italian's Story)

~ Catherine Crowe

I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor...I truly believe that when the rich meet the poor, riches will have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end.

~ Shane Claiborne

In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. --Aristotle

~ Cornel West

The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts.

~ Rhonda Byrne

It might be depressing, but it's also the truth that no one has the power, the money, or the resources to save everyone on the planet from going hungry, living in poverty or allowed basic human rights. But consider the other side of this: there are people in this world who truly WOULD do all of these things for everyone if only they could. There is hope after all.

~ Ashly Lorenzana

Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known to be poor that is the sting.

~ Jerome K. Jerome

Poverty is not only about income levels, but for lack of freedom that comes from physical insecurity

~ Jacqueline Novogratz

The poverty of the villages is almost picturesque from the windows of a coach that is not stopping.

~ Andrew Miller

One does not go to Moscow to get fat.

~ John Updike

The Poverty Tour provided the opportunity to meet many people who had been living paycheck to paycheck even before the economic downturn. To so quickly slide from the great middle into the underworld of the poor validated our suspicions that perhaps these citizens never really were bona fide, middle class Americans. Indeed, some economists assert that the middle class evaporated decades ago.

~ Cornel West

His lines had been honed over centuries, passed down through generations, for poor people needed certain lines; the script was always the same, and they had no option but to beg for mercy.

~ Kiran Desai

I have an old hat which is not worth three francs, I have a coat which lacks buttons in front, my shirt is all ragged, my elbows are torn, my boots let in the water; for the last six weeks I have not thought about it, and I have not told you about it. You only see me at night, and you give me your love; if you were to see me in the daytime, you would give me a sou!

~ Victor Hugo

At the street corner, a one-storey house built of freestone, but repulsively decrepit and filthy, seemed to command the entrance, like a gaol. And here, indeed, lived La Méchain, like a vigilant proprietess, ever on the watch, exploiting in person her little population of starving tenants.

~ Émile Zola

The walls were chipped and needed paint. The windows were mostly okay but one pane was blocked with cardboard. There were fleas the exterminator couldn't kill and rats that scrabbled in the walls and mice who left droppings like a cocked snook and roaches that thrived on insecticide, even the illegal kinds.

~ John Brunner

...while God has done his part in creating a world capable of providing what we need, we have not done our part in the stewardship of it, in seeing that it gets to the end of the line, to the poorest and neediest--the children.

~ Wess Stafford

The walls around the hood keep the people on the inside from the changes on the outside.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

Valuables. That was a hot one, Richards thought, unbuttoning his shirt. He had an empty wallet with a few pictures of Sheila and Cathy, a receipt for a shoe sole he had replaced at the local cobbler's six months ago, a keyring with no keys on it except for the doorkey, a baby sock that he did not remember putting in there, and the package of Blams he had gotten from the machine.

~ Stephen King

I'd rather be poor to my bones than be rich with your money, that is like a trigger, ready to be pulled in my face.

~ Nema Al-Araby

Poverty is like a crumb that sits at a table, and starves itself to death.

~ Anthony Liccione

Poverty fled, she who gives birth to virile men.

~ Marcus Annaeus Lucanus

What is Poverty? A hateful good, a mother of health, a putting away of cares, a discoverer of wisdom, business without injury, ownership without calumny, happiness without anxiety.

~ Secundus The Silent

Which statements are true according to the passage?A) Science, governments, and your doctor should be trusted.B) 'Comforting her deep into the night' is a euphemism for sneaking candy.C) The ugliest phrase used in this passage is 'female.'D) Bad things really do come in threes.

~ Tupelo Hassman

Stop the poverty! Where do they think they are going?!

~ Ljupka Cvetanova

Nigeria has no business with poverty. With our human and material resources, we shall strive to eradicate poverty from our country.

~ Olusegun Obasanjo

I utterly reject the view that the Third World is doomed to poverty and starvation. Not only is this wrong, I think this attitude verges on the immoral, like thinking that slavery is an unalterable facet of the human condition so why bother doing anything about it?

~ Alex Tabarrok

First, I was so dazzled and besotted by India. People said the poverty was biblical, and I'm afraid that was my attitude, too. It's terribly easy to get used to someone else's poverty if you're living a middle-class life in it. But after a while, I saw it wasn't possible to accept it, and I also didn't want to.

~ Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, sickness and captivity would, without this comfort, be insupportable.

~ William Samuel Johnson

I come from a poor family, I have seen poverty. The poor need respect, and it begins with cleanliness.

~ Narendra Modi

We can win respect in the world only if we are strong internally and can banish poverty and unemployment from our country.

~ Lal Bahadur Shastri

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

~ Bill Cosby

The problems we face now - poverty and violence at home, war and destruction abroad - will last only as long as we continue relying on the same politicians who created them in the first place.

~ Donald Trump