Poverty Quotes

“To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.”
― Jane Jacobs

“Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon.”
― Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns

“For Ragamuffins, God's name is Mercy. We see our darkness as a prized possession because it drives us into the heart of God. Without mercy our darkness would plunge us into despair - for some, self-destruction. Time alone with God reveals the unfathomable depths of the poverty of the spirit. We are so poor that even our poverty is not our own: It belongs to the mysterium tremendum of a loving God.”
― Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel

“Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.”
― Muhammad Ali

“We must powder our wigs; that is why so many poor people have no bread.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Our entire system, in an economic sense, is based on restriction. Scarcity and inefficiency are the movers of money; the more there is of any resource the less you can charge for it. The more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money.

This reality is a social disease, for people can actually gain off the misery of others and the destruction of the environment. Efficiency, abundance and sustainability are enemies of our economic structure, for they are inverse to the mechanics required to perpetuate consumption.

This is profoundly critical to understand, for once you put this together you begin to see that the one billion people currently starving on this planet, the endless slums of the poor and all the horrors of a culture due to poverty and pravity are not natural phenomenon due to some natural human order or lack of earthly resources. They are products of the creation, perpetuation and preservation of artificial scarcity and inefficiency.”
― Peter Joseph

“But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

“the holy art of “giving for Jesus’ sake” ought to be much more strongly developed among us Christians. Never forget that all state relief for the poor is a blot on the honor of your savior. The fact that the government needs a safety net to catch those who would slip between the cracks of our economic system is evidence that I have failed to do God’s work. The government cannot take the place of Christian charity. A loving embrace isn’t given with food stamps. The care of a community isn’t provided with government housing. The face of our Creator can’t be seen on a welfare voucher. What the poor need is not another government program; what they need is for Christians like me to honor our savior.”
― Abraham Kuyper, The Problem of Poverty

“ليس الفقر هو الذي سيصير سببا في الحركة والتمرد لكنه الإحساس بالفقر، إن شعور الطبقة المحرومة بالنسبة للوضع الطبقي المتناقض في مجتمعها هو الذي يدفعها للحركة.”
― Ali Shariati, العودة إلى الذات (الآثار الكاملة، #11(

“A community that is growing rich and seeks only to defend its goods and its reputation is dying. It has ceased to grow in love. A community is alive when it is poor and its members feel they have to work together and remain united, if only to ensure that they can all eat tomorrow!”
― Jean Vanier, Community and Growth

“There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge. Both poverty and riches are the offspring of thought.”
― Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

“.. becoming attached to a country involves pressing, uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens.”
― Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

“But then it is easy, too easy, to sermonize about the dangers of paternalism and the need to take responsibility for our own lives, from the comfort of our couch in our safe and sanitary home. Aren't we, those who live in the rich world, the constant beneficiaries of a paternalism now so thoroughly embedded into the system that we hardly notice it?”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

“In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had - a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“Poverty does not belong in civilized human society. Its proper place is in a museum. That's where it will be.”
― Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“What extreme poverty really means is that no matter how hard you work, you’re trapped. You can’t get out. Your efforts barely matter. You’ve been left behind by those who could life you up.”
― Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

“But we reservation Indians don’t get to realize our dreams. We don’t get those chances. Or choices. We’re just poor. That’s all we are.

It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you’re poor because you’re stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you’re stupid and ugly because you’re Indian. And because you’re Indian you start believing you’re destined to be poor. It’s an ugly circle and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“Some people are silently struggling with burdens that would break our backs.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“Life is too short to be anything but happy. So kiss slowly. Love deeply. Forgive quickly. Take chances and never have regrets. Forget the past but remember what it taught you.”
― Abhishek Shukla, KISS Life "Life is what you make it"

“Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Golden Apples of the Sun

“It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless.”
― Masha Gessen, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

“بالا بروید پایین بیایید، اصلاً قرآن را بر سر جامعه‌ای پهن کنید، مادام که در آن جامعه در یک سو گرسنه بیچاره از سرما لرزان وجود دارد، و از سوی دیگر متنعمان برخوردار از همه چیز، این جامعه لجن است. تمام چهره‌اش را هم که با قرآن بپوشانید باز لجن است.”
― سید محمد حسینی بهشتی, بایدها و نبایدها

“So I heard the boom of my father's rifle when he shot my best friend. A bullet only costs about two cents, and anybody can afford that.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“Nothing awakens the conscience like a lot of money.”
― P Sainath

“At the heart of the celebration, there are the poor. If [they] are excluded, it is not longer a celebration. [...] A celebration must always be a festival of the poor.”
― Jean Vanier, Community and Growth

“If you can't afford the good food or if you can't afford health care or if you don't have a job or if your car is dangerous because you can't get it fixed and you DIE, you just lost the game-bzzzzz-thanks for playing extreme capitalism.”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

“Look at your own poverty
welcome it
cherish it
don't be afraid
share your death
because thus you will share your love and your life”
― Jean Vanier, Community and Growth

“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, Man on Fire

“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, Rainbow Pie

“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, Americanah