Poverty Quotes

“There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an inner-city child only eight years old "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years before.”
― Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation

“The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her—her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that ‘It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,’ and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her—understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“I thought it very touching to see these two women, coarse and shabby and beaten, so united; to see what they could be to one another; to see how they felt for one another, how the heart of each to each was softened by the hard trials of their lives. I think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us. What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and God.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“ما الذي يقعدك؟.. الفقر؟.. العوز؟.. ولكن الفقر هو الذي يصنع الفنان. وهو أمر لابد منه في البداية. إنك الآن إنسان مهمل، لا يحتاج إليك أحد، ولا يحتاج أحد أن يعرفك.. تلك هي الحياة..”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Netochka Nezvanova

“For if in careless summer days
In groves of Ashtaroth we whored,
Repentant now, when winds blow cold,
We kneel before our rightful lord;

The lord of all, the money-god,
Who rules us blood and hand and brain,
Who gives the roof that stops the wind,
And, giving, takes away again;

Who spies with jealous, watchful care,
Our thoughts, our dreams, our secret ways,
Who picks our words and cuts our clothes,
And maps the pattern of our days;

Who chills our anger, curbs our hope,
And buys our lives and pays with toys,
Who claims as tribute broken faith,
Accepted insults, muted joys;

Who binds with chains the poet’s wit,
The navvy’s strength, the soldier’s pride,
And lays the sleek, estranging shield
Between the lover and his bride.”
― George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

“And every historic effort to forge a democratic project has been undermined by two fundamental realities: poverty and paranoia. The persistence of poverty generates levels of despair that deepen social conflict the escalation of paranoia produces levels of distrust that reinforce cultural division. Rae is the most explosive issue in American life precisely because it forces us to confront the tragic facts of poverty and paranoia despair, and distrust. In short, a candid examination of race matters takes us to the core of the crisis of American democracy (p. 107).”
― Cornel West, Race Matters

“Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity and to walk toward a civilization which will be free and intelligent; which will be healthy and unafraid, and build in the world a culture led by black folk and joined by peoples of all colors and all races - without poverty, ignorance and disease!”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader

“Without an informed electorate, politicians will continue to use the bottom billion merely for photo opportunities, rather than promoting real transformation.”
― Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

“I’ve always felt that your belongings have never been on a level with you.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“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, The White Tiger

“It required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favorite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

“For avarice begins where poverty ends.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions

“We have to examine the extent to which we export poverty to other societies. When we decide that we will import products from China that are produced by people earning less than a dollar an hour, and grant their country most-favored-nation status (political contributions notwithstanding), we are deciding to make American workers who must earn the minimum wage compete with them. I am not suggesting that we close the doors to China or to Mexico, but I am suggesting that we look very carefully at the web of international relationships that we are creating. At the very minimum, we should understand that we have two choices in our country: we can raise world living standards by exporting those standards, or we can lower living standards- not only the world’s but also our own- by deciding that it is acceptable for the products of exploited labor to enter this country.”
― Julianne Malveaux

“You'd think (losing his job and degree for having made false claims as a researcher) would be a lesson to him," said Miss Hillyard. "It didn't pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour for the women and children we hear so much about -- but in the end it left him worse of."

But that," said Peter, "was only because he committed the extra sin of being found out.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“In the past 20 years alone, it adds up to more death than were caused by all the civil and international wars adn government repression of the entire twentieth century, the century of Hitler and Stalin. How much would we give to prevent those horrors? Yet how little are we doing to prevent today's even larger toll and all the misery that it involves? I believe that if you read this book to the end, and look honestly and carefully at our situation, assessing both the facts and the ethical arguments, you will agree that we must act.”
― Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty

“She missed -- without knowing what she missed-- paints and crayons”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“the larger the percentage of the national income taken by taxes the greater the deterrent to private production and employment. When the total tax burden grows beyond a bearable size, the problem of devising taxes that will not discourage and disrupt production becomes insoluble.”
― Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson

“His strength for your weakness! His wisdom for your folly! His drive for your drift! His grace for your greed! His love for your lust! His peace for your problems! His joy for your sorrow! His plenty for your poverty!”
― Major Thomas

“Mere inflation-that is, the mere issuance of more money, with the consequence of higher wages and prices-may look like the creation of more demand. But in terms of the actual production and exchange of real things it is not.”
― Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson

“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.”
― Phoolan Devi, The Bandit Queen Of India: An Indian Woman's Amazing Journey From Peasant To International Legend

“Peanut butter is a poor man’s marmalade.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Certainly, the wealth of the rich is a consequence of the poverty of the poor. (Lori Altmann, p. 85)”
― Mev Puleo, The Struggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation

“The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“Streets like the one she lived on were no accident. They were the North’s lynch mobs, she thought bitterly; the method the big cities used to keep Negroes in their place. And she began thinking of Pop unable to get a job; of Jim slowly disintegrating because he, too, couldn’t get a job, and of the subsequent wreck of their marriage; of Bub left to his own devices after school. From the time she was born, she had been hemmed into an ever-narrowing space, until now she was very nearly walled in and the wall had been built up brick by brick by eager white hands.”
― Ann Petry, The Street

“We shouldn’t be forced to choose at all. The fury in Aida’s voice was familiar. Nostalgic. I’d once possessed that strain of fury, as had my fellow cooks, my friends, my produce guy, a virulent rage against our tainted inheritance of this stupid, smog-choked planet. But it couldn’t last. We’d been inoculated from rage by other, more immediate concerns. For example: how to pay rent, how to stay alive. Aida, rich as she was, hadn’t been forced to choose between anger and dinner. For the first time in years, I tasted, through her, that feeling.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“According to the 2003 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, 25.8 percent of [New Orleans] population lives below the poverty line... This is more than twice the national average, but is close tot he percentages in other American cities such as Miami (28.5), Los Angeles (22.1), Atlanta (24.4), and New York City (21.2). ”
― Billy Sothern, Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City

“When Americans find out I grew up in the tenements, the question they invariably ask me is “how did you end up there?” Americans, it seems, find comfort in reasons and explanations. They honestly believe that if they can find the reason for someone else’s misfortune, they can avoid that misfortune themselves. If they could find out how I ended up in the tenements, they could assure themselves that it could never have happened to them.”
― Susan Lynn Peterson, Clare

“Un miros de sărac, un miros de violență, de necesitatea de a parveni.”
― Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, Ritornela foamei

“I took the book and glanced at the page Guy was reading. I quoted, ‘The rich man’s substance is the wellspring of the poor man’s living.' Ah yes, that theory, that as the rich grow richer their wealth trickles down to the poor like sand. Well, I have been practising law twenty-five years and all I have seen is it trickle ever upwards.”
― C.J. Sansom, Tombland

“Nepal is confronted with many societal issues, including the caste system, child labor, illiteracy, gender inequality, superstitions, religious disputes, and a slew of other issues.”
― Santosh Kalwar, Why Nepal Fails