Best 2723 quotes in «poverty quotes» category

I am not wise enough to say how much of all this squalor and wretchedness and hunger is the fault of the people themselves, how much of it belongs to circumstances and environment, how much is the result of past errors of government, how much is race, how much is religion. I only know that children should never be hungry, that there are ignorant human creatures to be taught how to live; and if it is a hard task, the sooner it is begun the better, both for teachers and pupils. It is comparatively easy to form opinions and devise remedies, when one knows the absolute truth of things; but it is so difficult to find the truth here, or at least there are so many and such different truths to weigh in the balance....

I ate so many Ramen noodles that I wouldn't even touch a package of them now.

I believe in a world in which science is the key for supporting the development of a happy future for humanity. So, I advocate for such a situation in which scientists would speak louder. If science is silent, there is no way to solve high priority problems at a global level, such as: the gap between developed and undeveloped countries, poverty, limited energy resources, limited food and even drinking water (especially related to the population growth phenomenon), global warming and rapid climate changes, etc.

..I began speaking.. First, I took issue with the media's characterization of the post-Katrina New Orleans as resembling the third world as its poor citizens clamored for a way out. I suggested that my experience in New Orleans working with the city's poorest people in the years before the storm had reflected the reality of third-world conditions in New Orleans, and that Katrina had not turned New Orleans into a third-world city but had only revealed it to the world as such. I explained that my work, running Reprieve, a charity that brought lawyers and volunteers to the Deep South from abroad to work on death penalty issues, had made it clear to me that much of the world had perceived this third-world reality, even if it was unnoticed by our own citizens. To try answer Ryan's question, I attempted to use my own experience to explain that for many people in New Orleans, and in poor communities across the country, the government was merely an antagonist, a terrible landlord, a jailer, and a prosecutor. As a lawyer assigned to indigent people under sentence of death and paid with tax dollars, I explained the difficulty of working with clients who stand to be executed and who are provided my services by the state, not because they deserve them, but because the Constitution requires that certain appeals to be filed before these people can be killed. The state is providing my clients with my assistance, maybe the first real assistance they have ever received from the state, so that the state can kill them. I explained my view that the country had grown complacent before Hurricane Katrina, believing that the civil rights struggle had been fought and won, as though having a national holiday for Martin Luther King, or an annual march by politicians over the bridge in Selma, Alabama, or a prosecution - forty years too late - of Edgar Ray Killen for the murder of civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, were any more than gestures. Even though President Bush celebrates his birthday, wouldn't Dr. King cry if he could see how little things have changed since his death? If politicians or journalists went to Selma any other day of the year, they would see that it is a crumbling city suffering from all of the woes of the era before civil rights were won as well as new woes that have come about since. And does anyone really think that the Mississippi criminal justice system could possibly be a vessel of social change when it incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than almost any place in the world, other than Louisiana and Texas, and then compels these prisoners, most of whom are black, to work prison farms that their ancestors worked as chattel of other men? ... I hoped, out loud, that the post-Katrina experience could be a similar moment [to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fiasco], in which the American people could act like the children in the story and declare that the emperor has no clothes, and hasn't for a long time. That, in light of Katrina, we could be visionary and bold about what people deserve. We could say straight out that there are people in this country who are racist, that minorities are still not getting a fair shake, and that Republican policies heartlessly disregard the needs of individual citizens and betray the common good. As I stood there, exhausted, in front of the thinning audience of New Yorkers, it seemed possible that New Orleans's destruction and the suffering of its citizens hadn't been in vain.

... I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.

I began to come into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease, with the inability to cure a child because of a lack of resources… And I began to see there was something that, at that time, seemed to me almost as important as being a famous researcher or making some substantial contribution to medical science, and this was helping those people.

I believe that the emphasis on curbing population growth diverts attention from the more vital issue of pursuing policies that allow the population to take care of itself.

I can only afford five apples instead of eight. I’m so broke!” exclaimed one woman. “I know, right,” replied another. Their conversation made me sick.

I decided I would go with them, but it would be at my father's house that I would eat. I would share his food, and his poverty.

I didn't have a drill, so I had to make my own. First I heated a long nail in the fire, then drove it through a half a maize cob, creating a handle. I placed the nail back on the coals until it became red hot, then used it to bore holes into both sets of plastic blades.

I do not want to be rich yet live a life of unhappiness. I also do not want to be poor, because I have never seen happiness in poverty.

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

I do not want you to live in the dream world because time erratically passes away in that world. Come to reality and begin to act now.

I don't know. I got nothing. No house, no people, no place. Maybe that's troubles. Don't I say?

I don't make much of a living, but I do live much of a making.

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.

I don’t want to wake up. I can’t feel the cold of life. I can’t feel fear in my dreams. When awake we are green and red bits glowing under a machine, lights turn off and on, and people of science convince themselves they know what’s going on. Backs are patted, hand are shaken. Test, record, collect. They tell us what we already know. We are all dying, dying slow. When awake, there is a feeling of impending doom, and if you can’t feel it, close your eyes, or open them further. When we’re in a box underground, heaven is finally above us, but it’s not in the sky. Heaven is the planet we lived on, and all of the angels are people. Here, in a dream, it’s just me floating in the back of my mind, among parts we don’t fully understand.

I don't, when I think of a city, think of these people, people with very little who are content with that. That is, I think about poverty and culture and traffic and pollution and crime...

[If] a man doesn't have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.

If achieving world peace and ending poverty were really genuine concerns to the majority, then they would have happened already by now. So, either people are not aware of their collective power, or their fears overpower their desires. The amount of money spent on the military-industrial complex in one year is more than enough to end hunger in Africa. Every problem on earth today has more than one solution. However, priorities are determined by values.

If all had to wait for better things until they could be provided for all, that day would in many instances never come. Even the poorest today owe their relative material well-being to the results of past inequality.

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

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.

If believers in God don't honor the cries and claims of the poor, we don't honor him, whatever we profess, because we hide his beauty from the eyes of the world. When we pour ourselves out for the poor—that gets the world's notice.

I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to 'LIllustration. Something desperate, you know." Zagreus smiled. "You're a poor man, Mersault. That explains half of your disgust. And the other half you owe to your own submission to poverty.

If God really valued loyalty, He would have blessed every single believer before He even considered blessing a single nonbeliever.

If Hemingway is to believed, poverty is an invaluable school for a writer. Poverty makes a man clear-sighted. And so on. It's interesting that Hemingway realized this only when he became rich.

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.

If I could remove one thing from the world and replace it with something else, I would erase politics and put art in its place. That way, art teachers would rule the world. And since art is the most supreme form of love, beautiful colors and imagery would weave bridges for peace wherever there are walls. Artists, who are naturally heart-driven, would decorate the world with their love, and in that love — poverty, hunger, lines of division, and wars would vanish from the earth forever. Children of the earth would then be free to play, imagine, create, build and grow without bloodshed, terror and fear.

I floundered and scrambled in my mind, contemplating the filthy glorious mysteries of luck, of being born with things, the meaning of money, murder by poverty. It was immoral to have and pointless to give. I could give away everything and it would be nothing. The money would dry like dew, and we would join the impoverished masses, my children sleeping in dirt and begging from cars, waiting miserably for the hour of a death that would deliver us. And yet if I did nothing I was complicit. My soft life was an obscenity.

If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.

If our family was poor, of what did our poverty consist? If our clothes were torn the torn places only let in the sun and wind. In the winter we had no overcoats, but that only meant that we ran rather than loitered. Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty.

If we adopt the same collaborative mindset and practices that got to the moon and back, and that built the International Space Station, we can alleviate poverty—and do much more.

If someone talks bad about us, we feel bad. If someone talks good about us we feel good. The question is ,Have we given our remote to others for the way we feel? Live your life in your way!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If the apostles reminded even Paul himself to remember the poor (Galatians 2:10), then surely the rest of us need such a reminder.

If there is anything you need in life that you haven’t gotten, it is because you are yet to pay for it via the currency of time.

If there is such a thing as "white privilege" its the belief that the last 200 years of progress in human liberty and technological innovation would have occurred under any other type of government. THE CONSTITUTION MATTERS.

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.

If poverty is the mother of all crimes, lack of intelligence is their father.

If that church is not adding value to your life, you may want to reconsider how often you go to church.

If that which conspires to silence poor people had hands, shame would be its thumbs.

If the pocket goes dry but the mind is fertile, awake and plant something noble in the mind and you shall surely reap something noble in the end, no matter what!

If there is any church service that you attend and it quickens your purpose and adds value to your life, if that church gives you some insight and understanding and a picture of how to do things better and become a solution provider to the problems of humanity in your country, then you can keep attending such a church.

If trickle-down economics worked, we would not have four food banks in Kensington and Chelsea.

If we agree that God did not create poverty, then in my opinion, poverty came in to being as a consequence of human rights violations.

If we try to see something positive in everything we do, life won't necessarily become easier but it becomes more valuable.

If you allow any minute of your time to pass without converting it into products, you will soon realize that you just wasted a part of your life.

If you allow someone else to convert more time than you in your chosen territory, you automatically become a servant or a second class citizen in that territory and whoever it is who converted more time than you in that territory becomes your king and will lord it over you in that territory.

If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future

If you are generous, you are rich, no matter how little you have; if you are stingy, you are poor, no matter how much you have.