Quotes on Poverty

Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life.

We have done some of these in Bangladesh. Whenever I see a problem, I immediately go and create a company. That's what I did all my life.

...culture is useless unless it is constantly challenged by counter culture. People create culture; culture creates people. It is a two-way street. When people hide behind a culture, you know that's a dead culture.

Credit is a human right that should be treated as a human right. If credit can be accepted as a human right, then all other human rights will be easier to establish.

I strongly believe that we can create a poverty-free world, if we want to.... In that kind of world, [the] only place you can see poverty is in the museum. When school children will be on a tour of the poverty museum, they will be horrified to see the misery and indignity of human beings. They will blame their forefathers for tolerating this inhuman condition to continue in a massive way.

We have to get out of this mindset that the rich will do the business and the poor will have the charity.

The only place where poverty should be is in museums.

In the future the question will not be, "Are people credit-worthy", but rather, "Are banks people-worthy?"

Let us work in partnerships between rich and poor to improve the opportunities of all human beings to build better lives.

Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man's well-being is not their goal.

Remember, no more effort is required to aim high in life, to demand abundance and prosperity, than is required to accept misery and poverty.

The first quality of a soldier is constancy in enduring fatigue and hardship. Courage is only the second. Poverty privation and want are the school of the good soldier.

It is but a short step from hunger to starvation, from disease to death.

Poverty ... It is life near the bone, where it is sweetest.

Nothing incites to money-crimes like great poverty or great wealth.

As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them of course, but one cannot possibly admire them.

The poor man commands respect; the beggar must always excite anger.

The trouble is that rich people, well-to-do people, very often don't really know who the poor are; and that is why we can forgive them, for knowledge can only lead to love, and love to service. And so, if they are not touched by them, it's because they do not know them

As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg

You take my life when you do take the means whereby I live

We create institutions and policies on the basis of the way we make assumptions about us and others. We accept the fact that we will always have poor people around us. So we have had poor people around us. If we had believed that poverty is unacceptable to us, and that it should not belong to a civilized society, we would have created appropriate institutions and policies to create a poverty-free world.