Poverty Quotes - Page 39

• You can't lift people out of poverty simply by tweaking the tax system, or by raising the minimum wage by a few cents, or by reducing student debt slightly. These might be necessary components of a larger anti-poverty program, but you have to accept they are pieces of a much larger puzzle.

  Sasha Abramsky

  People, Students, Program

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• A lot of kids spent more time out of school than in, but I always loved school and thought it was my way out of Cleveland, and out of poverty.

  Tracy Chapman

  School, Kids, Cleveland

  "The quiet revolutionary". Interview with Amy Fleming, www.theguardian.com. October 30, 2008.

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• Investment in the eradication of hunger today is a good business decision. If we fail to make this investment, it is doubtful that we can sustain healthy economic growth. Without this investment, our nation may disintegrate into a country sharply divided between those who have enough to eat and those who do not.

  Alan Hassenfeld

  Country, Decision, Healthy

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• The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Work, Cases, Hard

  "The biggest brother". Interview with Sean O'Hagan, www.theguardian.com. July 20, 2003.

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• First we have to recognize that the cause of poverty is both structural and behavioral. And the first thing about the behavior part is that we need a moral revolution within the African American community. Look - no white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Teenager, White, Community

  "35 Million Ways to Be Black". Interview with Adam Hochschild, www.motherjones.com. March 14, 2007.

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• The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Opportunity, Class, Dysfunction

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• People from both political parties have long recognized that welfare without work creates negative incentives that lead to permanent poverty. It robs people of self-esteem.

  Mitt Romney

  Self Esteem, Party, Long

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• Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Determination, Men, Giving

  Franklin D. Roosevelt (2008). “Fireside chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: radio addresses to the American people about the Depression, the New Deal, and the Second World War, 1933-1944”, Red & Black Pub

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• Let us become like Christ, since Christ became like us. He assumed the worse that He might give us the better; He became poor that we through His poverty might be rich.

  Gregory of Nazianzus

  Giving, Suffering, Might

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• Poverty is the greatest cause of terrorism.

  S. Azmat Hassan

  Liberty, Libertarian, Causes

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• Sonnet XXV Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own: I wavered through the streets, among Objects: Nothing mattered or had a name: The world was made of air, which waited. I knew rooms full of ashes, Tunnels where the moon lived, Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost', Questions that insisted in the sand. Everything was empty, dead, mute, Fallen abandoned, and decayed: Inconceivably alien, it all Belonged to someone else - to no one: Till your beauty and your poverty Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.

  Pablo Neruda

  Autumn, Moon, Tunnels

  Pablo Neruda, “Sonnet XXV”

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• God has no needs. Human love, as Plato teaches us, is the child of Poverty – of want or lack; it is caused by a real or supposed goal in its beloved which the lover needs and desires. But God's love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, causes all the goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence, and then into real, though derivative, lovability. God is Goodness. He can give good, but cannot need or get it. In that sense , His love is, as it were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give, and nothing to receive.

  C. S. Lewis

  Plato, Children, Real

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• There is no peace in poverty

  Lisa Kleypas

  Lisa Kleypas (2015). “The Travis Family Series, Books 1-3: Blue-Eyed Devil, Smooth Taking Stranger and Sugar Daddy”, p.455, St. Martin's Press

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• I promise to love and cherish you, to honor and sustain you, in sickness and in health, in poverty and in wealth,in the bad that may darken our days, in the good that may light our way. Tirzah, beloved, I promise to be true to you in all things until I die. And even beyond that, God willing

  Francine Rivers

  Light, Honor, Promise

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• The Government justifies keeping everyone else in poverty because people seem to work the hardest when they're right on the edge of survival.

  Margaret Haddix

  Government, People, Survival

  Margaret Peterson Haddix (2002). “Among the Hidden”, p.136, Simon and Schuster

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• Poverty has its advantages. When you're that poor what would you have that anyone would want? Except your peace of mind. Your dignity. Your heart. The important things.

  Ana Castillo

  Heart, Mind, Important

  Ana Castillo (2000). “Peel My Love Like an Onion: A Novel”, Anchor

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• None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Wise, Should, Human Life

  Henry David Thoreau (2015). “Thoreau on Nature: Sage Words on Finding Harmony with the Natural World”, p.26, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Garden, Clothes

  Henry David Thoreau (2009). “Walden”, p.212, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and it is not cured by medication. Depression may not even be an illness at all. Often, it can be a normal reaction to abnormal situations. Poverty, unemployment, and the loss of loved ones can make people depressed, and these social and situational causes of depression cannot be changed by drugs.

  Irving Kirsch

  Loss, People, Drug

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• I grew up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium, that "hard work" was the secret of success: "Work hard and you'll get ahead" or "It's hard work that got us where we are." No one ever said that you could work hard - harder even than you ever thought possible - and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Hard Work, Secret, Finding Yourself

  "Nickel and Dimed". Book by Barbara Ehrenreich, progressive.org. January 1, 2010.

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• It had been a royal time of luxury to him, with all its stings and contumelies, compared to the poverty that crept round and clipped the anticipation of the future down to sordid fact, and life without an atmosphere of either hope or fear.

  Elizabeth Gaskell

  Luxury, Atmosphere, Royal

  Elizabeth Gaskell (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Elizabeth Gaskell (Illustrated)”, p.1236, Delphi Classics

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• It's obsequious little nicety-nice girls like me who allow assholes to run the world: Miss Harlot O'Harlots, billionaire phony tree huggers, hypocrite drug-snorting, weed-puffing peace activists who fund the mass-murdering drug cartels and perpetuate crushing poverty in dirt-poor banana republics. It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Crush, Girl, Running

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• This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said. "There is noth-ing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes tocondemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!

  Charles Dickens

  World, Wealth, Pursuit

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• In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms

  John Steinbeck

  Doe, May, Riches

  John Steinbeck (2008). “The Winter of Our Discontent”, p.108, Penguin

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• A short time ago the demagogues blamed capitalism for the poverty of the masses. Today they rather blame capitalism for the "affluence" that it bestows upon the common man.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Men, Today, Affluence

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