Poverty Quotes - Page 7

What does hanging on a cross for twenty-four hours mean to a man who has no children,' I said, 'especially when he knows he's dying for a good cause -- indeed, that he's saving the whole world and then going straight into the best place in Heaven? What's that compared to the suffering I've had to put up with for months and years with the house full of children, when for many whole nights I've shrieked with pain unceasingly and without relief, and I'll soon be dead, and that without having anything to die for; and there'll be no heavenly Kingdom for me, for I know the children will go on crying when I'm dead, and swearing and quarrelling, and begging for milk they can't get.

Halldór Laxness

Those who reject Christianity will not be moved by Christ’s statement that poverty is blessed. But here a rather remarkable fact comes to my aid. Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere ‘opiate of the people’ have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all mankind except the poor. They regard the poor as the only people worth preserving from ‘liquidation’, and place in them the only hope for the human race. But this is not compatible with a belief that the effects of poverty on those who suffer it are wholly evil; it even implies that they are good. The Marxist thus finds himself in real agreement with the Christian in those two beliefs which Christianity paradoxically demands – that poverty is blessed and yet ought to be removed.

C.S. Lewis

The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.

Dorothy Day

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

Hélder Câmara

Poverty's simplicity has an inexpensive beauty rooted in it, which the rich can never afford to buy

Munia Khan

Those who spend all they earn always end in penury.

Bamigboye Olurotimi

Poverty should first be addressed in the mind because even if you give millions to a poor person, until there's a change of mindset, they will still remain the same.

Gift Gugu Mona

Some women would not cheat, and some would not have cheated, had they each married a man whom they love … or at least like.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It didn't matter that there was a war on our doorstep. She had things to do, places to be.

Trevor Noah

Poor women suffer terrible sexual violence that goes unreported. Because of their social class, these women do not have access to therapy or other methods of healing. Their repeated abuse ultimately eats away at their self-esteem, driving them to drugs, prostitution, AIDS, and in many cases, death.

Eve Ensler

UN studies conducted in more than forty developing countries show that the birth rate falls as women gain equality... I believe income-earning opportunities that empower poor women ... will have more impact on curbing population growth that the current system of "encouraging" family planning practices through intimidation tactics.. Family planning should be left to the family.

Muhammad Yunus

[I]t is not by being richer or more powerful that a man becomes better; one is a matter of fortune, the other of virtue. Nor should she deem herself other than venal who weds a rich man rather than a poor, and desires more things in her husband than himself. Assuredly, whomsoever this concupiscence leads into marriage deserves payment rather than affection.

Héloïse d'Argenteuil

The obscenities of this country are not girls like you. It is the poverty which is obscene, and the criminal irresponsibility of the leaders who make this poverty a deadening reality. The obscenities in this country are the places of the rich, the new hotels made at the expense of the people, the hospitals where the poor die when they get sick because they don't have the money either for medicines or services. It is only in this light that the real definition of obscenity should be made.

F. Sionil Jose'

There are three impossibilities in life: God cannot lie, God cannot change and finally, I cannot be a poor man.

Ikechukwu Izuakor

If you have much, be generous; if you have little, be grateful; even if you have nothing, be hopeful.

Matshona Dhliwayo

There are three things that a beggar and a rich person share every day: the sun, the moon, and the stars.

Matshona Dhliwayo

If you have a house but no home, you are homeless; knowledge but no wisdom, you are imprudent; acquaintances but no friends, you are lonely; money but no happiness, you are poor; and life but no joy, you are lifeless.

Matshona Dhliwayo

You may be poor, but important; uneducated, but wise; lowly, but noble; simple, but insightful; and ordinary, but great.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Charity is fortune, avarice is poverty, peace is treasure, and happiness is wealth.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Pain teaches you more than pleasure. Failure teaches you more than success. Poverty teaches you more than prosperity. Adversity teaches you more than comfort.

Matshona Dhliwayo

In poverty, friends are few; in prosperity, acquaintances are numerous; in affluence, associates are countless.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Misfortune never comes singly. It's surrounded by bodyguards.

Ljupka Cvetanova

Because taxpaying is seen as an emblem of civic worthiness, denying the poor the status of taxpayers has the effect of denying their political standing. Classing a large percentage of the populace as a kind of second-class citizenry is genuinely toxic for democratic norms.

Vanessa Williamson

Politics is a game played by the rich with the lives of the poor.

J.Adam Snyder

In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.

Paul Theroux

The rich control our politics to a huge extend. In return they get tax cuts and deregulation. It's been and is an amazing ride for the rich.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

I, on the other hand, interrupt people because my thoughts fly out of my mouth. My handbag's full of rubbish. And I want to do something that matters with my life. Right now I'd like to write plays, sing in musicals, and/or rid the world of poverty, violence, cruelty, and right-wing conservative politics.

Alison Larkin

What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month, and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are generally given 'class' labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing 'class' makes class itself a nebulous concept. Yet the intelligentsia are habituated, if not addicted, to seeing the world in class terms.

Thomas Sowell

It is as difficult for most poor people to truly believe that they could someday escape poverty as it is for most wealthy people to truly believe that their wealth could someday escape them.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

If there were something that Mother Nature or God could do with money, She or He would have sold immortality to the rich a long time ago.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Poverty does not always prevent a rich person from dating someone who is poor, unless the man is the one who is poor.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It is in the best interest of the rich to preserve poverty.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Whether it is big or small, the size of a poor man’s yard incessantly reminds him that he is poor.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Some people ate less food less often when they each had a home than they now do as hobos.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Hardship bred a bitter, quickfire humour and resilience to all but the most terminal of life's tragedies.

Ian Rankin

Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.

George Orwell

While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it.While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Eugene V. Debs

The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity.

Erich Fromm

It never really ends...Children surviving through the cold winds of neglect, and all kinds of misfortune and vile treatment.We see them everyday, with broken smiles that endure the painful kicking of their malnourished bellies protruded with dreams that may never see the light of conception...But with just a little kind word,A handful of promise,A heart of compassion,A smile full of hope,We would hold hands together in helping them conceive their dreams...Because they are the little bits and pieces that make us whole...

Chinonye J. Chidolue

Poverty has in its favour an exquisite sleep filled with beautiful dreams.

Honoré de Balzac

No one asks poor people if they want war. Nor had anyone asked these poor people if they wanted to die of thirst and exposure on the coastal sea, or if they wanted to be robbed and raped by their own soldiers.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

For all these stars,nothing is new.They’ve seen all kinds of warsand miracles, too.They know the messengers with their holy bookswill smile and wash their hands in blood.They know the politicians with their good lookswill make the poor eat pies of mud.They’ve seen the Earth freeze and then burn with greed.They’ve seen the treesand the seas emptied.Yet, you won’t hear their sneerswhen a man arrivesand, having experienced a number of years,proclaims: 'I have lived!'Because nothing is new under these stars:the lies, the love, the memories and scars, the ruin, the revolution, the fakes and true,the families, the friends, none of it is new.All of it—even the me and you.

Kamand Kojouri

Death is buried there into death Hunger strikes on its own last breathNo spine to shiver, no heart talks At life’s craving poverty mocksFrom the poem 'Exhumation

Munia Khan

Inequality and poverty, unhealth and no wealth are hand in hand. And if we are all born equal that should be true in all lands. We cannot divide the world between poor and rich countries. It's like saying the ones are good, the others are junkies. That can only increase more prejudice, miseries and sorrow. Turning the wheel today it will lead to a better tomorrow.

Ana Claudia Antunes

Do not avert your eyes.It is important that you see this.It is important that you feelthis.

Kamand Kojouri

The worst stories usually make you think: 'but nobody had to die'.These are called true stories.

Moonshine Noire

Let my silence grow with noise as pregnant mothers grow with life. Let my silence permeate these walls as sunlight permeates a home. Let the silence rise from unwatered graves and craters left by bombs. Let the silence rise from empty bellies and surge from broken hearts. The silence of the hidden and forgotten. The silence of the abused and tortured. The silence of the persecuted and imprisoned. The silence of the hanged and massacred. Loud as all the sounds can be, let my silence be loud so the hungry may eat my words and the poor may wear my words. Loud as all the sounds can be, let my silence be loud so I may resurrect the dead and give voice to the oppressed. My silence speaks.

Kamand Kojouri

Persuading everyone to behave decently to each other because the society is so fragile is a worthy goal, but it may be more straightforward just to make the societies less fragile, which means developing their economies.

Paul Collier

Suppose a country starts its independence with the three economic characteristics that globally make a country prone to civil war: low income, slow growth, and dependence upon primary commodity exports. It is playing Russian roulette. That is not just an idle metaphor: the risk that a country in the bottom billion falls into civil war in any five-year period is nearly one in six, the same risk facing a player of Russian roulette.

Paul Collier

Problems are solved from the inside out not the other way around.

Vivian Amis

The Civilized… murder their children by producing too many of them without being able to provide for their well-being. Morality or theories of false virtue stimulate them to manufacture cannon fodder, anthills of conscripts who are forced to sell themselves out of poverty. This improvident paternity is a false virtue, the selfishness of pleasure.

Charles Fourier

All you have to do [to win a Pulitzer Prize] is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.

David Baldacci

Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.

Muhammad Ali

The ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry, but they cannot kill ignorance, illness, poverty or hunger.

Fidel Castro

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Look at that crowd', he said disgustedly. 'They think it's a circus.''And not a single coin are they donating', said Dina.'That's not surprising. Pity can only be shown in small doses. When so many beggars are in one place, the public goes like this' - he put his fists to his eyes, like binoculars.

Rohinton Mistry

There is no end in India, Mr. Jiabao,as Mr. Ashok so correctly used to say. You'll have to keep paying and paying the fuckers. But I complain about the police the way the rich complain; not the way the poor complain. The difference is everything.

Aravind Adiga

I’m learning persistence and the closing of doors, the way the seasons come and go as I keep walking on these roads, back and forth, to find myself in new time zones, new arms with new phrases and new goals. And it hurts to become, hurts to find out about the poverty and gaps, the widow and the leavers. It hurts to accept that it hurts and it hurts to learn how easy it is for people to not need other people. Or how easy it is to need other people but that you can never build a home in someone’s arms because they will let go one day and you must build your own.

Charlotte Eriksson

If all you have is money, you are among the poorest people in the world.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Love makes you the richest person in the world, no matter how poor you are.

Matshona Dhliwayo

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Poverty Quotes - Page 7

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