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Quote by Nicholas D. Kristof

“Over the last fifty years, poverty has come to be seen not just as an economic failing but also as a moral one, prompting a pervasive suspicion that the poor are secretly living cushy lives on government benefits. A Pew poll found that wealthy Americans mostly agreed that "poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”

Book:Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

Work

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

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Author

Nicholas D. Kristof

Nicholas D. Kristof is an American journalist renowned for his in-depth investigative reporting. Born on April 27, 1959, he has won the Pulitzer Prize and has been a columnist for The New York Times. Kristof's reporting focuses on global poverty, human rights, and foreign policy issues, often sparking public attention to important social issues. more

“Throughout this book, we've tried to argue that America has gone astray by perceiving poverty or drugs simply as a choice or as the consequence of personal irresponsibility. Yet in another sense, poverty is a choice. It is a choice by the country. The United States has chosen policies over the last half century that have resulted in higher levels of homelessness, overdose deaths, crime and inequality--and now it's time to make a difference choice.”

Poverty Homeless Drugs

Book:Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

Source: Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“The opportunity to attain great wealth is within the reach of almost every man and woman. Let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings. It is all wrong to be poor, anyhow.”

Wealth Poverty Self Improvement Charity

Book:Acres of Diamonds

Source: Acres of Diamonds

“Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly—the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”

Poverty

Author:William James

“Your belly may be empty and opportunities flicker dimly, but let your cheeks glow fat with the fortune of life.”