Explore Quotes on Poverty

It is obviously easier, for the short run, to draw cheap labor from adjacent pools of poverty...than to find it among one's own people. And to the millions of such prospective immigrants from poverty to prosperity, there is, rightly or wrongly, no place that looks more attractive than the United States. Given its head, and subject to no restrictions, this pressure will find its termination only when the levels of overpopulation and poverty in the United States are equal to those of the countries from which these people are now so anxious to escape.

...what about the millions of poor in this country who desperately need assistance and services to help bring them out of poverty? Shall they go to the back of the line? and shall those who have made a dramatic illegal entry, who would normally not be entitled to government assistance, or even entry itself, be put at the front?

Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, and through them presses a wild motley throng, men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes, featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho, Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav. Flying the Old World's poverty and scorn, these bringing with them unknown gods and rites, Ttose, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws in street and alley. What strange tongues are loud accents of menace alien to our air, voices that once the Tower of Babel knew! O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well to leave the gates unguarded?

It would seem that something which means poverty, disorder and violence every single day should be avoided entirely, but the desire to beget children is a natural urge.

By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men.

The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe that their locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their existence. It is a bit like a rich person living in a wealthy neighborhood not seeing any poverty.

Many people who order their lives rightly in all other ways are kept in poverty by their lack of gratitude.

Apart from their other characteristics, the outstanding thing about China's 600 million people is that they are “poor and blank”. This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing. Poverty gives rise to the desire for changes, the desire for action and the desire for revolution. On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written; the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted.

The lack of wealth is easily repaired but the poverty of the soul is irreplaceable.

No young man starting in life could have better capital than plenty of friends. They will strengthen his credit, support him in every great effort, and make him what, unaided, he could never be. Friends of the right sort will help him more - to be happy and successful - than much money.

Who then is free? The one who wisely is lord of themselves, who neither poverty, death or captivity terrify, who is strong to resist his appetites and shun honors, and is complete in themselves smooth and round like a globe

I think the United States and the secretary of State should be concerned about the poverty in this country - people without health insurance. The United States should stop being the empire and be concerned about other countries. You've got to be more worried about your own people.

We could say that compassion is the ultimate attitude of wealth: an anti-poverty attitude, a war on want. It contains all sorts of heroic, juicy, positive, visionary, expansive qualities. And it implies larger scale thinking, a freer and more expansive way of relating to yourself and the world.

Man's greatest actions are performed in minor struggles. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment and poverty are battlefields which have their heroes - obscure heroes who are at times greater than illustrious heroes.

Poverty hath slain a thousand, but riches have slain ten thousand. They are very uncertain, they promise that which they cannot perform, neither can they afford a contented mind.

The more I study the wealthy.. in an effort to learn how to help more people around the world become one of them.. I'm stunned by how many people are actually not rich.

What is really desired, under the name of riches, is essentially, power over men ... this power ... is in direct proportion to the poverty of the men over whom it is exercised, and in inverse proportion to the number of persons who are as rich as ourselves.

This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.

Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly.

Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty. There is none to tell the rich to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life.

Don't knock the rich. When did a poor person give you a job?