Top 595 Poverty Quotes

The trends that are shaping the twenty-first-century world embody both promise and peril. Globalization, for example, has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty while contributing to social fragmentation and a massive increase in inequality, not to mention serious environmental damage.

I don’t get up in the morning and think my mission is to end Britain. I do get up in the morning and think that my mission is to end poverty.

I grew up below the poverty line; I didn’t have as much as other people did. I think it made me stronger as a person, it built my character. Now I have a 4.0 grade point average and I want to go to college, and just become a better person.

What keeps me up at night is poverty and unemployment.

I don’t want people who are in poverty, in pain, or suffering, to suffer because it’s for their own good and they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I want to help them. I want us all to help them.

I remember my dad came from Ireland and Scotland, and so he carried with him the fear of poverty. So when I wanted to break loose, it kind of made him very nervous.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

Ending extreme poverty is possible.

The middle class has disappeared. We have a highway to poverty and no roads coming out.

Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.

The health benefits of paid sick days policies are obvious. They prevent the spread of disease. But the impact is wider. If a working mom or dad loses a job because of sickness, the family may slip into poverty.

It has to have a payroll tax that’s dedicated to Social Security. The Social Security tax has been very successful over the years in raising almost all of our elderly citizens out of poverty.

This pandemic has provided an opportunity to reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to reimagine economic systems, that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality and climate change.

Meat supplies a variety of nutrients – among them iron, zinc, and Vitamin B12 – that are not readily found in plants. We can survive without it; millions of vegetarians choose to do so, and billions of others have that choice imposed upon them by poverty.

The first priority of any serious program against poverty is to strengthen the male role in poor families.

Many Africans succumb to the idea that they can’t do things because of what society says. Images of Africa are negative – war, corruption, poverty. We need to be proud of our culture.

No level of border security, no wall, doubling the size of the border patrol, all these things will not stop the illegal migration from countries as long as a 7-year-old is desperate enough to flee on her own and travel the entire length of Mexico because of the poverty and the violence in her country.

U.K. welfare cuts are pushing more children into poverty; that is beyond dispute.

I come from a poor family, I have seen poverty. The poor need respect, and it begins with cleanliness.

I experienced how foreign aid for large-scale vaccination projects helps to save the life of children and thus give a real input to growth and to escaping poverty.

I think we’ve made tremendous progress on racism. We’ve even made progress on war. We’ve made almost no progress on poverty.

Too often, parents whose children express an interest in farming squelch it because they envision dirt, dust, poverty, and hermit living. But great stories come out of great farming.

The essence of Africa’s crisis is fundamentally its extreme poverty.

I’ve done a lot of practical anthropology, living in villages with people and realizing how difficult it is to get out of poverty. When in poverty, people use their skill to avoid hunger. They can’t use it for progress.

That made me feel good, not to go to a resort where outside the door is extreme poverty.

I’ve often said that far more sensible than a ‘make poverty history’ campaign would be a ‘make wealth history’ campaign. It is, after all, the wealthy people who do all the damage. The less money you earn, the fewer resources you use up.

I think one of the biggest mistakes that America has made – and maybe the world because this is, sort of, the core of communism and socialism – is that you can have perfect solutions to social problems like poverty, like crime. You’re not going to eliminate all crime. Maybe you’ll never eliminate all poverty.

People can be so apathetic. They continue to ignore the real people trapped in poverty and homelessness. It’s almost maddening.

To be a star is to own the world and all the people in it. After a taste of stardom, everything else is poverty.

As society advances the standard of poverty rises.

If we didn’t have Social Security, our seniors would live mostly in poverty. You’d have another 18 million people in poverty.

Grant me the treasure of sublime poverty: permit the distinctive sign of our order to be that it does not possess anything of its own beneath the sun, for the glory of your name, and that it have no other patrimony than begging.

In order to counteract income inequality, it’s essential to tackle poverty in an integrated way that has long-term impact. We need to give people the capacity to be resilient, to take on challenges and to learn the skills they need to work toward more prosperous futures.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Whether it’s someone struggling with mental illness, someone struggling with poverty or struggling with their own limitations in their social behaviors, for some reason, I’m drawn to characters like that.

I think people should know more of Africa in terms of its joie de vivre, its feeling for life. In spite of the images that one knows about Africa – the economic poverty, the corruption – there’s a joy to living and a happiness in community, living together, in community life, which may be missing here in America.

Poverty was the greatest motivating factor in my life.

The burden of poverty isn’t just that you don’t always have the things you need, it’s the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you’d do anything to lift that burden.

I need to be in charge, and that comes from when I was growing up and money was always an issue. I didn’t want to feel the fear of poverty again, and I suppose, in that way, I qualify as Thatcher Youth.

I made a decision that whether or not I was going to make under the national poverty level wasn’t going to play a part in whether or not I was an actor. That’s what I do.

We must be welcoming to those who flee their country because of violence and abject poverty in hopes of a better future – that’s who we are as Americans.

Nothing prompts creativity like poverty, a feeling of hopelessness, and a bit of panic.

One of the over-riding things for many who grow up in poverty is the simple desire to escape. I think it was sort of obvious to me that escape had to be through education.

Affluence separates people. Poverty knits ’em together. You got some sugar and I don’t; I borrow some of yours. Next month you might not have any flour; well, I’ll give you some of mine.

A source of embarrassment for Libyans, Gadhafi has never been a joke: disappearances, a police state, zero freedom of expression, and poverty for at least a third of the population of country tremendously wealthy thanks to oil.

It wasn’t simply that Clinton created the greatest prosperity in the country’s history. Or that we created 22 million new jobs, more than ever before. Under Clinton, poverty was reduced 25%.

The strongest predictor of unhappiness is anyone who has had a mental illness in the last 10 years. It is an even stronger predictor of unhappiness than poverty – which also ranks highly.

Poverty makes you sad as well as wise.

I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty – they are not out on the street; they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata.

I’ve been working on issues of poverty for more than 20 years, and so it’s ironic that the problem that and question that I most grapple with is how you actually define poverty. What does it mean?

He who has made a fair compact with poverty is rich.

For too long, we’ve attached some mythic notion to government solutions, and yet, 40 years after we began the War on Poverty, poverty still abounds.

By 2030, just a small percentage of the global population will live in poverty.

There’s a real sense of desperation when you grow up in poverty.

Poverty breeds lack of self-reliance.

First, women are more likely to live in poverty during their retirement years than are men.