Poverty Quotes - Page 3

True compassion does not sit on the laps of renovation; it dives with an approach to reconstruction. Don't throw a coin at a begger. Rather, destroy his source of poverty.

Israelmore Ayivor

Don't drive a car in the dream, else you won't drive it on earth. Don't wish to become, else you won't become. Don't associate with fools, else your ancestors will be insulted. Don't be addicted to wine, else your pocket will be empty. Don't be drunk, else you'll be attacked.

Michael Bassey Johnson

Poverty has deceived many of us into believing that some people who are in that state love the food, clothes, places, and people that they do not even like. The same can be said about wealth.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I am going to add a cold beer. Why not a bottle of whiskey? Because my story is cheap and cannot afford such props. Goddamn, even my imagination is not wealthy enough to order a bottle of Jack!

Plamen Chetelyazov

I don't want to be rich yet live a life of unhappiness, but I also don't want to be poor because I have never seen happiness in poverty.

Gugu Mona

How starved they seemed for ordinary kindness

Rohinton Mistry

Why had he wanted to be rich, or to feel rich? Was he an unhappy mouse before? Didn't he see the King himself often looking sad? Was anyone completely happy?

William Steig

It was the ghetto. I had seen them before from the high altitude of one who could look down and pity. Now I belonged here and the view was different. A first glance told it all. Here it was pennies and clutter and spittle on the curb... Here was the indefinable stink of despair. Here modesty was the luxury. People struggled for it... Here sensuality was escape, proof of manhood for people who could prove it no other way... Here hips drew the eye and flirted with the eye and caused the eye to lust or laugh. It was better to look at hips than at the ghetto.

John Howard Griffin

The face of poverty is a mixture of sincerity and sadness!

Mehmet Murat ildan

The world went on. People left and people died and people went to memorial services and put orange blocks of cheese into their purses. People confessed to you that they were hungry all the time. And then you got up in the morning and pretended that none of it had happened.

Kate DiCamillo

Our highest deeds come from helping the lowest people.

Matshona Dhliwayo

But words mattered, more so in Newark than many other places. In a world where income and possessions were limited, words represented dignity, pride, self-worth.

Jeff Hobbs

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

Herman Melville

Don't insult me today just because I'm poor, you don't know what my future holds!

William Kamkwamba

Today's youth will determine if we're going to fail or succeed in ending global poverty by 2030

Desmond Oshifeso

We were poor back then. Not living in a cardboard carton poor, not “we might have to eat the dog” poor, but still poor. Poor like, no insurance poor, and going to McDonald's was a really big excitement poor, wearing socks for gloves in the winter poor, and collecting nickels and dimes from the washing machine because she never got allowance, that kind of poor… poor enough to be nostalgic about poverty. So, when my mom and dad took me here for my tenth birthday, it was a really big deal. They’d saved up for two months to take me to the photography store and they bought me a Kodak Instamatic film camera… I really miss those days, because we were still a real family back then… this mall doesn’t even have a film photography store anymore, just a cell phone and digital camera store, it’s depressing…

Rebecca McNutt

The hood is also a low-stress, comfortable life. All your mental energy goes into getting by, so you don’t have to ask yourself any of the big questions. Who am I? Who am I supposed to be? Am I doing enough? In the hood you can be a forty-year-old man living in your mom’s house asking people for money and it’s not looked down on. You never feel like a failure in the hood, because someone’s always worse off than you, and you don’t feel like you need to do more, because the biggest success isn’t that much higher than you, either. It allows you to exist in a state of suspended animation.

Trevor Noah

I’m encouraging young people to become social business entrepreneurs and contribute to the world, rather than just making money. Making money is no fun. Contributing to and changing the world is a lot more fun.

Muhammad Yunus

All this is simply to say that all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty or thirty years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.

Martin Luther King Jr.

A non handicapped person who relies on mendicity has allowed poverty to monopolised his destiny.

Elijah Onyenmeriogu

The worker picked up Pakhom’s spade, dug a grave, and buried him - six feet from head to heel, exactly the amount of land a man needs.

Leo Tolstoy

The success of a civil order should not be judged by its most affluent members, but by the standard of living of its poor.

Bryant McGill

Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

J.K. Rowling

In time of poverty, you alone face is your fate. If your spirit is stronger enough, you will survive.

Lailah Gifty Akita

I do not use psychiatric terms in my writing because the entrenched and developing behaviours were perfectly normal reactions to abnormal situations.

Jane Hersey

As I grew into womanhood my confusion at the world became more apparent. I was taking comfort in behaviours that were familiar, not bathing, wearing multiple layers of clothes and, like my mother, I was bingeing on food. Of course I was still very much a lonely unsupported child myself when I got pregnant - one who had never been nurtured or mothered and as such I struggled with the responsibilities of parenthood.

Jane Hersey

Marginalised and abused children are often overlooked even today, and risk becoming marginalised and abused adults who may never receive acknowledgment or respect for the immense physical and emotional burden they carry from childhood or indeed have their full potential realised.

Jane Hersey

We are all the product of our past and have to live with our memories and personality they cannot be erased.

Jane Hersey

Unprovoked hostility is often but displaced self-defense: 'I must stop him before he stops me.' In many of such environments, nobody is really hateful so much as they are just fearful.

Criss Jami

To me, the poor are like Bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a six-inch deep flower pot, you get a perfect replica of the tallest tree, but it is only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted; only the soil-base you provided was inadequate.Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with their seeds. Only society never gave them a base to grow on.

Muhammad Yunus

That's the myth of it, the required lie that allows us to render our judgments. Parasites, criminals, dope fiends, dope peddlers, whores--when we can ride past them at Fayette and Monroe, car doors locked, our field of vision cautiously restricted to the road ahead, then the long journey into darkness is underway. Pale-skinned hillbillies and hard-faced yos, toothless white trash and gold-front gangsters--when we can glide on and feel only fear, we're well on the way. And if, after a time, we can glimpse the spectacle of the corner and manage nothing beyond loathing and contempt, then we've arrived at last at that naked place where a man finally sees the sense in stretching razor wire and building barracks and directing cattle cars into the compound.It's a reckoning of another kind, perhaps, and one that becomes a possibility only through the arrogance and certainty that so easily accompanies a well-planned and well-tended life. We know ourselves, we believe in ourselves; from what we value most, we grant ourselves the illusion that it's not chance in circumstance, that opportunity itself isn't the defining issue. We want the high ground; we want our own worth to be acknowledged. Morality, intelligence, values--we want those things measured and counted. We want it to be about Us.Yes, if we were down there, if we were the damned of the American cities, we would not fail. We would rise above the corner. And when we tell ourselves such things, we unthinkably assume that we would be consigned to places like Fayette Street fully equipped, with all the graces and disciplines, talents and training that we now posses. Our parents would still be our parents, our teachers still our teachers, our broker still our broker. Amid the stench of so much defeat and despair, we would kick fate in the teeth and claim our deserved victory. We would escape to live the life we were supposed to live, the life we are living now. We would be saved, and as it always is in matters of salvation, we know this as a matter of perfect, pristine faith.Why? The truth is plain:We were not born to be niggers.

David Simon

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more. Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine. During an emergency, like an earthquake or a hurricane, taxes pay for rescue workers, shelters, and services. For people whose lives are devastated by other kinds of disaster, like the disaster of poverty, taxes pay, even, for food.

Jill Lepore

Nothing is ‘wrong’ with me, Dan. What’s wrong with you? she said in the same eerily quiet voice, dark eyes fixated on Dan, as she breathed heavily.

Martin Hopkins

The slick concrete reflected the facades of the work weary - grey, cracked and old,but more importantly, trodden upon.

Martin Hopkins

Join us. Play the game. It will bring you an untold number of rewards and you will finally have some direction and purpose in your lives. Take control of yourselves and those around you. Bend them to your will and all worldly pleasures will be yours...

Martin Hopkins

Hunger and necessity are poor teachers of morality. A society that cannot provide the basics of life does not get its laws obeyed.

A.J. Quinnell

Dynasties rise and fall according to what the Chinese used to call ‘the mandate of heaven’, but life for the peasant changes little.

Kenneth Minogue

I thought society would do the right thing. Now I look around and I think -- society never does the right thing. Sometimes people do the right thing. Sometimes one person makes a difference. But civilization has rules, and I've learned them well -- never be helpless, never be sick, never be poor.

Christina Dodd

The rich eat life, the poor eat death; so what is the problem they ask?

Anthony Liccione

Hunger quashes man's will to help his fellow man.

Kang Chol-Hwan

We used to talk and smile seven days ago when I was wearing a suit. Now I'm dressed in a beard and smell of dog shit I don’t even get eye contact. I ask her how her week is going, and she looks to her friend behind the counter as if to say: I think this creep is hitting on me. Shall we call the police?

Craig Stone

There was and still is a tremendous fear that poor and working-class Americans might one day come to understand where their political interests reside. Personally, I think the elites worry too much about that. We dumb working folk were clubbed into submission long ago, and now require only proper medication for our high levels of cholesterol, enough alcohol to keep the sludge moving through our arteries, and a 24/7 mind-numbing spectacle of titties, tabloid TV, and terrorist dramas. Throw in a couple of new flavours of XXL edible thongs, and you've got a nation of drowsing hippos who will never notice that our country has been looted, or even that we have become homeless ourselves.

Joe Bageant

I could go into their reality any time I chose to, but they could never come into mine. This is what I called 'helping' them.

Agnostic Zetetic

A thief is one who insists on sharing his victimhood.

Criss Jami

The job of the politician is to speak for all people; not just for parties with vested interests, or organisations with the biggest wallets. The first people a politician should protect are those that cannot protect themselves: Those weakest and most vulnerable among us. This is, to most of us, something that seems to be an obvious statement of fact, and that may be so, but it’s also a forgotten fact. Now, today, the opposite is true. It should shame us all. It shames me. The very fact that the most poor and the most vulnerable in our society are those that are victimised and stamped upon, whereas the most wealthy and the most influential are making more profits and acquiring more assets and wealth than ever before in history, is a damning indictment of what our society has become

Paul Howsley

The proper task of social reform is to remove poverty from society and to ensure that people do not sell their conscience to make a living.

Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

Whomsoever I love and hate, my principle is the same. That is, the educated, the rich and the administrators should not suck the blood of the poor.

Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

Take care of others now, so they can take care of you in future.

Rumman Bin Sadiq

Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn't commit.

Eli Khamarov

Thus it is, we sow motions of hatred out of our own impoverished understanding of love. Yet we do so in the name of love. The perplexing precipice of the illusory infirmity.

Steven Storm

In a materialistic society, the dead body of a rich man’s dog is regarded as a corpse; that of a poor man, a carcass.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

In an advanced industrial society it becomes almost impossible to seek, even to imagine, unemployment as a condition for autonomous, useful work. The infrastructure of society is arranged so that only the job gives access to the tools of production...Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.

Ivan Illich

They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar

Henry David Thoreau

So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved; so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;—in other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use. HAUTEVILLE HOUSE, 1862. [Translation by Isabel F. Hapgood]

Victor Hugo

Anywhere you have extreme poverty and no national health insurance, no promise of health care regardless of social standing, that's where you see the sharp limitations of market-based health care.

Paul Farmer

It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

George Orwell

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

Charles Darwin

Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.

Aristotle

Does rough weather choose men over women? Does the sun beat on men, leaving women nice and cool?' Nyawira asked rather sharply. 'Women bear the brunt of poverty. What choices does a woman have in life, especially in times of misery? She can marry or live with a man. She can bear children and bring them up, and be abused by her man. Have you read Buchi Emecheta of Nigeria, Joys of Motherhood? Tsitsi Dangarembga of Zimbabwe, say, Nervous Conditions? Miriama Ba of Senegal, So Long A Letter? Three women from different parts of Africa, giving words to similar thoughts about the condition of women in Africa.''I am not much of a reader of fiction,' Kamiti said. 'Especially novels by African women. In India such books are hard to find.''Surely even in India there are women writers? Indian women writers?' Nyawira pressed. 'Arundhati Roy, for instance, The God of Small Things? Meena Alexander, Fault Lines? Susie Tharu. Read Women Writing in India. Or her other book, We Were Making History, about women in the struggle!''I have sampled the epics of Indian literature,' Kamiti said, trying to redeem himself. 'Mahabharata, Ramayana, and mostly Bhagavad Gita. There are a few others, what they call Purana, Rig-Veda, Upanishads … Not that I read everything, but …''I am sure that those epics and Puranas, even the Gita, were all written by men,' Nyawira said. 'The same men who invented the caste system. When will you learn to listen to the voices of women?

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Aaron was wearing a T-shirt that was practically transparent with washing and sweatpants with a hole in the knee. His blond hair stuck up like duck fluff and he looked barely awake. Tamara looked tense. Her hair was carefully braided and she wore pink pajamas that said I FIGHT LIKE A GIRL across the front. Under the words was a screen print of cartoon girls executing deadly ninja moves.

Cassandra Clare

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Poverty Quotes - Page 3

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