Poverty Quotes

All over the world there are students, teachers and parents that face serious challenges every day. They need help with real problems that have life-altering consequences—and a group of intelligent professionals brought together to advise and educate stakeholders in need of help ought to be able to do so without behaving like a middle school drama queen.

~ Tucker Elliot

As one 1935 study put it, boys and girls who were 15 or 16 in 1929 when the Depression began are no longer children; they are grown-ups – adults who had never, since they left school, had anything productive to do; adults in the embittered by years of suffering and hardship. The President's Advisory Commission on Education was to warn of a whole lost generation of young people.

~ Robert A. Caro

You can admire the way someone meets hard circumstances, but you can't admire him because of them.

~ Elizabeth Harrower

Using money in one’s attempt to put an end to poverty is like using a border in one’s attempt to put an end to xenophobia.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I’ve always thought that was the lamest argument—that we need some people to be poor in order to remind the rest of us to be grateful. All that really means is that someone has to suffer poverty so other people can feel better about themselves. What a selfish way to look at the world.

~ Josephine Angelini

Rich people read their bills. Poor people dread theirs.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

There is nothing more sickening than talking about poverty over a fancy dinner.

~ Shane Claiborne

Is there for honest Poverty That hings his head, an' a' that; The coward slave-we pass him by, We dare be poor for a' that! For a' that, an' a' that. Our toils obscure an' a' that, The rank is but the guinea's stamp, The Man's the gowd for a' that. What though on hamely fare we dine, Wear hoddin grey, an' a that; Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine; A Man's a Man for a' that: For a' that, and a' that, Their tinsel show, an' a' that; The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor, Is king o' men for a' that. Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord, Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that; Tho' hundreds worship at his word, He's but a coof for a' that: For a' that, an' a' that, His ribband, star, an' a' that: The man o' independent mind He looks an' laughs at a' that. A prince can mak a belted knight, A marquis, duke, an' a' that; But an honest man's abon his might, Gude faith, he maunna fa' that! For a' that, an' a' that, Their dignities an' a' that; The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth, Are higher rank than a' that. Then let us pray that come it may, (As come it will for a' that,) That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth, Shall bear the gree, an' a' that. For a' that, an' a' that, It's coming yet for a' that, That Man to Man, the world o'er, Shall brothers be for a' that.

~ Robert Burns

Someday war and poverty will be crazy and we will wonder how the world allowed such things to exist.

~ Shane Claiborne

Politics will always mean more to the poor. Always. That's why we strike and march, and despair when our young say they won't vote. That's why the poor are seen as more vital, and animalistic. No classical music for us - no walking around National Trust properties or buying reclaimed flooring. We don't have nostalgia. We don't do yesterday. We can't bear it. We don't want to be reminded of our past, because it was awful: dying in mines and slums without literacy or the vote. Without dignity. It was all so desperate then. That's why the present and the future is for the poor - that's the place in time for us: surviving now, hoping for better later. We live now - for our own instant hot, fast treats, to pep us up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio.

~ Caitlin Moran

Distinctive facial features of a parent are poor people’s paternity test.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The lives of the thirty thousand children who die of starvation each day is like 6 september 11ths every single day, a silent tsunami that happens every week.

~ Shane Claiborne

Poverty is a great educator. Having no boundaries and refusing to be ignored, it mostly teaches hopelessness. But not always. Politics is also a great educator. Mostly it teaches, I am afraid, cynicism. But not always. Television is a great educator as well. Mostly it teaches consumerism. But not always. It is the not always that keeps the romantic spirit alive in those who write about schooling. The faith is that despite some of the more debilitating teachings of culture itself, something can be done in school that will alter the lenses through which one sees the world; which is to say, that nontrivial schooling can provide a point of view from which what IS can be seen clearly, what WAS as a living present, and what WILL BE as filled with possibility

~ Neil Postman

If you have a poverty of heart then you are the poorest among the poor.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Being broke didn't seem so awful as it had yesterday, being broke but being at peace with the world.(Don't Wait Up For Me Tonight)

~ Cornell Woolrich

The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on.

~ Ernest Hemingway

To fight the poverty, we must feel the poverty.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

Begging is much more difficult than it looks. Contrary to popular belief, it’s a high art form that takes years of dedicated practice to master.

~ Sol Luckman

It takes money to make money, even begging. Humans are herd animals. If a stranger’s bleeding to death beside the road, most people won’t stop to offer a Band-Aid. But get the ball rolling with a couple Good Samaritans, and before you know it you’ve got more eager philanthropists than you know what to do with.

~ Sol Luckman

When you hear her say,'What else can an old woman doon hills as wretched as these?'You look right at the sky,Clear through the bullet holes she has for eyes.And you look onthe cracks that begin around her eyesspread beyond her skinAnd the hills crack.And the temples crack.And the sky falls with a plateglass clatter around the shatter proof cronewho stands alone.And you are reducedto so much small changein her hand.

~ Arun Kolatkar

Ifemelu would also come to learn that, for Kimberly, the poor were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were the foreign poor.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Why else do you think we are permanently at war in various regions all over the world? And why is it the citizens of this country, one of the richest on earth, get poorer each year?

~ James Morcan

For the mentally disturbed, Marie knew these sandwich visits might be the only dependable moments in their lives. She also knew she delivered the sandwiches for her own sanity. Something would crumble inside of her if she ever walked by a homeless person and pretended not to notice. Or simply didn't care. In a way, she believed that homeless people were treated as Indians had always been treated. Badly. The homeless were like an Indian tribe, nomadic and powerless, just filled with more than any tribe's share of crazy people and cripples. So, a homeless Indian belonged to two tribes, and was the lowest form of life in the city. The powerful white men of Seattle had created a law that made it illegal to sit on the sidewalk. That ordinance was crazier and much more evil than any homeless person. Sometimes Marie wondered if she worked so hard at anything only because she hated powerful white men. She wondered if she went to college and received good grades just because she was looking for revenge.

~ Sherman Alexie

The important question of how poverty can be remedied is one which agitates and torments modern societies especially

~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

People in the city are poor because they are oppressed, discriminated against and alienated; people in the country are poor because they're too stupid to realize they ought to be living in the city.

~ Garret Keizer

We cannot fight against the poverty and hunger in the world, when our stomachs are full of delicious food, the fighters must feel the poverty not imagine it.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

Coca cola and McDonalds is spreading. Just like hunger and poverty.

~ Tim Goossens

Many of my classmates have happier memories of Blessed Sacrament, and in time I would find my own satisfaction in the classroom. My first years there, however, I met with little warmth. In part, it was that the nuns were critical of working mothers, and their disapproval was felt by latchkey kids. The irony of course was that my mother wouldn't have been working such long hours if not to pay for that education she believed was the key to any aspirations for a better life.

~ Sonia Sotomayor

Once our family was very small and we used to say, ‘’our planet has enough resources to feed all of us’’ but today, we are not that family and it is a burden on our planet to feed us. We have to reconsider our views and confess ‘’our planet has not enough resources to feed all of us anymore’’.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

He was confronted at an early age with adult-strength realizations about powerlessness, desperation, and distrust, taking his dose right alongside the overwhelmed adults. This steady stream of shocks and realizations leaves so many boys raised in poor, urban areas stumbling toward manhood with a hardened exterior masking deep insecurities.

~ Ron Suskind

I went to Guatemala to help build a school but left wondering what help would really look like... I hadn't prepared myself for how humbled I'd feel, or how hard it would be to find my footing when witnessing a cycle of poverty that seemed to defy any sort of help.

~ Dee Williams

Only by helping yourself first can you help the poor. Only by changing yourself first, can you change their condition. You achieve this by first removing from your mind any thoughts of poverty, for to think of something is to invoke it.

~ Stephen Richards

Maybe your college professor taught that the legacy of colonialism explains Third World poverty. That’s nonsense as well. Canada was a colony. So were Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. In fact, the richest country in the world, the United States, was once a colony. By contrast, Ethiopia, Liberia, Tibet, Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan were never colonies, but they are home to the world’s poorest people.

~ Walter Williams

The government belongs to the poor people of the country. We are custodian of people's hope. For whom should the government be? For educated people or few others. Government should be for the poor. If rich want to educate their children, they can send anywhere. If rich fall ill, hundreds of doctors are at service. So the foremost responsibility of the government should be to listen to the poor and work for them. If we do not work for the poor, the people will never pardon us.

~ Narendra Modi

Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production.

~ Paul Lafargue

Anyone who said money didn't matter had never had to count the coins that fell between the cushions of the couch.

~ Nora Roberts

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

Without the sleeping bag I'm just somebody up early in the morning, sitting under a tree. With the sleeping bag I'm nobody up early, sitting under a tree: a slight, but important difference in how I’ll be perceived.

~ Craig Stone

Poor people have poor options. Chavez found the Army almost by accident, and had found it a true open of security and opportunity and fellowship and respect.

~ Tom Clancy