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Poverty Quotes

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Poverty Quotes

“Many writers claim that nearly all crime is caused by economic conditions, or in other words that poverty is practically the whole cause of crime. Endless statistics have been gathered on this subject which seem to show conclusively that property crimes are largely the result of the unequal distribution of wealth. But crime of any class cannot be safely ascribed to a single cause. Life is too complex, heredity is too variant and imperfect, too many separate things contribute to human behavior, to make it possible to trace all actions to a single cause.”

“In Blue Crush , we meet three Hawaiian surfers who work as hotel maids, live in a grotty rental, and are raising the kid sister of one of them. Despite this near-poverty, they look great; there is nothing like a tan and a bikini to overcome class distinctions.”

Looks Kids Three Class Poverty Overcoming Blue Despite Crush Distinction Hotel Maids Bikinis Surfer Hawaiians Class Distinction

Book:Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2005

Source: Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2005

“China is now suffering from poverty, not from unequal distribution of wealth. Where there are inequalities of wealth, the methods of Marx can, of course, be used; a class war can be advocated to destroy the inequalities. But in China, where industry is not yet developed, Marx's class war and dictatorship of the proletariat are impracticable.”

War Used Suffering Courses Wealth Class Poverty Industry Method China Inequality Dictatorship Distribution Proletariat Distribution Of Wealth

Author:Sun Yat-sen

“Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty. Given a comfortable middle-class start in life, the artist is almost sure to end up by becoming a bellyacher, constantly complaining because the public does not rush forward at once to proclaim him.”

Should Doe Art Ends Artist Given Class Poverty Middle Becoming Comfortable Training Should Have Complaining Middle Class

Book:A Story Teller's Story: The Tale of an American Writer's Journey Through His Own Imaginative World and Through the World of Facts, with Many of His Experiences and Impressions Among Other Writers--told in Many Notes--in Four Books--and an Epilogue

Source: A Story Teller's Story: The Tale of an American Writer's Journey Through His Own Imaginative World and Through the World of Facts, with Many of His Experiences and Impressions Among Other Writers--told in Many Notes--in Four Books--and an Epilogue

“While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of "rags to riches" were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control.”

Men Stories Wealth Class Poverty Study Middle Percent Myth Riches Executives Steel Rags Railroads Upper Class Horatio Textiles Rags To Riches

Book:A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present

Source: A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present

“Being Black and poor is, I think, radically different from being anything else and poor. Poor, to most Blacks, is a state of mind. Those who accept it are poor; those who struggle are middle class.”

Thinking Mind Different States Black Poor Accepting Class Poverty Struggle Middle Middle Class State Of Mind

Book:Sacred cows-- and other edibles

Source: Sacred cows-- and other edibles

“In a process that had begun in the 1980s and suddenly accelerated in the early 2000s ... [t]he peaks of great wealth grew higher, rising up beyond the clouds, while the valleys of poverty sank lower into perpetual shadow. The once broad plateau of the middle class eroded away into a narrow ledge, with the white-knuckled occupants holding on for dear life.”

Process Wealth White Class Poverty Middle Grew Higher Shadow Dear Clouds Rising Middle Class Broads Valleys Perpetual Holding On Rising Up Ledges Dear Life

Book:Going to Extremes: Notes from a Divided Nation

Source: Going to Extremes: Notes from a Divided Nation

“Middle-class-led reform movements, from the Progressive Era to the War on Poverty, have been marred by an elitist distance from the would-be beneficiaries of reform.”

Has Beens War Would Be Class Poverty Middle Movement Distance Reform Eras Middle Class Progressive Elitist Beneficiaries War On Poverty Reform Movements

Book:FEAR OF FALLING

Source: FEAR OF FALLING

“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”

Source: The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations

“Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. ... poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one's own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time.”

Writing May Has Beens Art Done Form Voice Poor Rooms Secret Class Poverty Materials Paper Majors Labor Plenty Prose Poetry Is Hospitals Working Class Subway Scrap Typewriters Surplus Pantry

Author:Audre Lorde

“If woman's sole responsibility is of the domestic type, one class will be crushed by it, and the other throw it off as a badge of poverty. The poor man's motto, 'Woman's work is never done,' leads inevitably to its antithesis - ladies' work is never begun.”

Ifs Men Done Poor Responsibility Class Poverty Type Sole Motto Crushed Poor Man Housework Badges Antithesis

Author:Antoinette Brown Blackwell

“70% of children born into poverty will never make it to the middle class. The uncomfortable truth is that there are now a number of other countries with as much or more opportunity than ours. In fact, more people in Canada go on to surpass the income of their parents than in the United States.”

People Children Country States Facts Opportunity Parent Born United Numbers Class Poverty United States Middle Goes On Truth Is Income Uncomfortable Canada Middle Class Other Countries

Author:Marco Rubio

“We have a middle class that lives on a razor blade. So sometimes when you say poverty, you neglect a large portion of the population.”

Sometimes Class Poverty Middle Population Middle Class Neglect Portions Blades Razors

Author:Elizabeth Edwards

“It is in the middle classes of society that all the finest feeling, and the most amiable propensities of our nature do principally nourish and abound. For the good opinion of our fellow-men is the strongest though not the purest motive to virtue. The privations of poverty render us too cold and callous, and the privileges of property too arrogant and confidential, to feel; the first places us beneath the influence of opinion--the second, above it.”

“The United States, which has been called the home of the persecuted and the dispossessed, has been since its founding an asylum for emotional orphans. For over three hundred years, refugees from political oppression, religious persecution, famine, poverty, and a rigid class system which limited educational and economic opportunities have been leaving their native villages and cities and coming to the United States in search of freedom and a better life.”

“What's with the poverty Tourette's? Why do these two think we need a hobo for president?”

Thinking Needs Two Reality Politics President Money Class Poverty Comedy Strategy Voting Tourettes Hobos

Author:Jon Stewart

“... it is more than petty treason to the Republic, to call a free citizen a servant. The whole class of young women, whose bread depends upon their labour, are taught to believe that the most abject poverty is preferable to domestic service. Hundreds of half-naked girls work in the paper-mills, or in any other manufactory, for less than half the wages they would receive in service; but they think their equality is compromised by the latter, and nothing but the wish to obtain some particular article of finery will ever induce them to submit to it.”

“No matter how well-born, how intelligent, how highly educated, how virtuous, how rich, how refined, the women of to-day constitutea political class below that of every man, no matter how base-born, how stupid, how ignorant, how vicious, how poverty-stricken, how brutal. The pauper in the almshouse may vote; the lady who devotes her philanthropic thought to making that almshouse habitable, may not. The tramp who begs cold victuals in the kitchen may vote; the heiress who feeds him and endows universities may not.”

“The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see aroundthem so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their children's future--fear that they'll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.”

People Children Facts Pain Young Found Parent Loses Class Poverty Streets Style Wind Touched Jail Stem Working Class Accompany Child Rearing Delinquency

Author:Lillian B. Rubin

“A "snapshot" feature in USA Today listed the five greatest concerns parents and teachers had about children in the '50s: talking out of turn, chewing gum in class, doing homework, stepping out of line, cleaning their rooms. Then it listed the five top concerns of parents today: drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, suicide and homicide, gang violence, anorexia and bulimia. We can also add AIDS, poverty, and homelessness. . . . Between my own childhood and the advent of my motherhood--one short generation--the culture had gone completely mad.”

“If we wanted a program to help the majority of the population, we'd offer loan guarantees to help poor people get access to reliable cars so that they could have a better shot at getting - and keeping - a well-paying job...A small amount of capital could make a much bigger difference in their lives than extra student loan relief for middle-class college kids would.”

“I know of no system other than Hinduism under which a class has been set apart from generation to generation for the exclusive pursuit of divine knowledge and consigned to voluntary poverty.”

Knows Has Beens Class Poverty Generations Divine Pursuit Hinduism Exclusive

Book:The Encyclopaedia of Gandhian Thoughts

Source: The Encyclopaedia of Gandhian Thoughts

“Hundreds of millions of people around the world have been lifted out of poverty with the creation of robust middle classes in India and China, which is an enormously positive development for those countries that also creates opportunities for the rest of the world.”

People World Has Beens Country Opportunity Class Poverty Millions Middle Creation Development India China Around The World Middle Class Robust

Author:Dan Quayle

“Because my graduate academic training at law school was not one that included most of the intellectual traditions I find useful for understanding the conditions and problems that most concern me - anti-colonial theories, Foucault, critical disability studies, prison studies and the like are rarely seen in standard US Law School curricula, where students are still fighting on many campuses to get a single class on race or poverty offered - I developed most of my thinking about these topics through activist reading groups and collaborative writing projects with other activist scholars.”

“Given the fact that poverty is growing, more and more Americans are losing health insurance, health care costs are going up, the middle class is shrinking, the gap between the rich and the poor is growing wider. That speaks to the weakness of the opposition. People do not like George W. Bush. But I think it's fair to say that they are not flocking to the Democratic Party, or see the Democrats as a real alternative.”

“Poor people in America today (people who are officially in poverty) have a higher standard of living - in terms of medical standards, in terms of going to college, in terms of the way people live - than middle class people did thirty years ago.”

“The Economic Problem...the problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations, is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and unnecessary muddle.”

Want Problem Nations Class Poverty Struggle Economic Unnecessary Transitory Muddle Economic Problems

Author:John Maynard Keynes

“Capitalism in the 19th century did not doom the worker to a life of perpetual poverty. Instead, they kept creating new and better-paying employments as the decades went by. They produced the wealth and rising income that resulted in the emergence of a phenomenon completely new to human history: a self-supporting and educated middle class that grew more and more as they lower classes bettered their economic well-being.”

“Even when I was living below the poverty line as a novelist, I was still living better than 99.5% of the human population of the world. But in my little, soft realm of trying to amuse a few dozen middle-class people with my books and articles, I did struggle to survive in my own way.”

People World Way Trying Humans Littles Stills Book Lines My Own Class Poverty Struggle Middle Population Novelists Realms Middle Class Articles Dozen Human Population Living Better

Author:Jonathan Ames

“Between 2001 and 2011, Brazil lifted 20 million people out of poverty and into its growing middle class, and in the last quarter of the twentieth century Botswana's gross domestic product per capita grew faster than that of any other country on the planet. The once-labeled 'Third World' is edging its way into the 'First World.'”

Source: Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth

“My father was brought to this country as an infant. He lost his mother as a teenager. He grew up in poverty.Although he graduated at the top of his high school class, he had no money for college. And he was set to work in a factory but, at the last minute, a kind person in the Trenton area arranged for him to receive a $50 scholarship and that was enough in those days for him to pay the tuition at a local college and buy one used suit. And that made the difference between his working in a factory and going to college.”

“Colombia has a big market that is growing because we are elevating people out of poverty and into the middle class.”

People Bigs Class Poverty Growing Middle Middle Class Colombia Elevating

Author:Juan Manuel Santos

“[Albert Camus] positions are sensed. So, naturally, those intellectuals who don't have that experience have difficulty in comprehending it. But I think it made Camus more tolerant because he had already seen both sides of things when the others had only ever seen one. They imagine poverty, but they don't know what it is. In fact they've got a sort of bad conscience about the working classes.”

Thinking Knows Made Facts Sides Class Poverty Imagine Position Conscience Difficulty Working Class Both Sides Comprehending

Author:Catherine Camus

“[French intellectuals] could never address themselves to the working classes. They don't know what it means, and that gives them a bad conscience about it. [Albert] Camus has a greater proximity to those in poverty.”

Knows Giving Mean Class Poverty Greater Conscience Addresses Working Class Proximity

Author:Catherine Camus

“The Black public sector middle class teachers, policeman, firemen, and post office workers, those jobs have been on the decline but there hasn't been a corresponding increase in the private sector. What is especially painful is government policy bailed out the banks without making them make reinvestments for rebuilding. The result is 53-million Americans are food insecure, 50-million Americans are in poverty, 44 million are on food stamps, 26 million are looking for a job.”

“If you want to get at African American poverty, the income gap, wealth gap, achievement gap, that the most important thing is to make sure that the society as a whole does right by people who are poor, are working class, are aspiring to a better life for their kids.”

People Ifs Want Doe Important Whole Kids Wealth Poor Class Poverty Achievement Important Things Income African American Gaps Working Class Better Life Achievement Gap American Poverty

Author:Barack Obama

“Wages never seem to go up. The whole economy feels stuck, and millions of Americans, millions of Americans, middle-class security is now just a memory. Progressives like to talk like Barack Obama likes to talk forever about poverty in America. And if a talk did any good, we'd have overcome those deep problems long ago. This explains why under the most liberal president we have had so far, poverty in America is worse, especially for our fellow citizens who were promised better and who need it most.”

“The Democrat Party makes as many people victims as possible because it freezes them right where they are. And that's usually in lower middle class or abject poverty. It makes them resentful.”

People Party Class Poverty Middle Victim Democrat Middle Class Freeze Resentful

Author:Rush Limbaugh

“The Mexican people are increasingly middle class, and Mexico has substantially become a middle-class society. This is true despite the significant poverty, and the class and geographic inequality that have deep historical roots.”

People Class Poverty Middle Roots Historical Significant Despite Inequality Middle Class Mexico Mexican

Author:Alan Bersin

“My father is a gypsy. He traveled in caravans and was branded by the Ku Klux Klan. You know I have a history about race in my family that has very much to do with the other things that you name about poverty, about class, about access - or lack of it.”

Knows Father Names Race Class Poverty My Family Access Traveled Gypsy Ku Klux Klan Branded Caravans

Author:Amber Hollibaugh

“Rather than dividing the world between good and evil, the Left divided the world in terms of economics. Economic classes, not moral values, explained human behavior. Therefore, to cite a common example, poverty, not one's moral value system, or lack of it, caused crime.”

“In the richest country in the history of the world, this Obama economy has crushed the middle class. Family income has fallen by $4,000, but health insurance premiums are higher, food prices are higher, utility bills are higher, and gasoline prices have doubled. Today more Americans wake up in poverty than ever before.”

World Country Today Class Poverty Economy Middle Higher Wake Up Bills Income Fallen Middle Class World History Utility Crushed Gasoline Middle Class Family Gasoline Prices Obama Economy

Author:Mitt Romney

“Free enterprise has done more to lift people out of poverty, to help build a strong middle class, to help educate our kids, and to make our lives better than all the programs of government combined.”

People Done Helping Government Kids Strong Class Poverty Our Lives Middle Program Lifts Enterprise Middle Class Educate Free Enterprise

Author:Mitt Romney

“Are we interested in treating the symptoms of poverty and economic stagnation through income redistribution and class warfare, or do we want to go at the root causes of poverty and economic stagnation by promoting pro-growth policies that promote prosperity?”

Want Causes Growth Class Poverty Economic Policy Roots Prosperity Income Warfare Symptoms Promoting Stagnation Class Warfare Root Cause Causes Of Poverty Income Redistribution

Author:Paul Ryan

“And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”

Men Trying Humans Long War God Stories Religion Christianity Class Poverty Terrible Ambition Slavery Mere Empires Hopeless Human History Prostitution

Book:A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis

Source: A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis

“There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.”

Humanity Class Poverty Higher Misery Miserable Lower Class Miserable People Les Mis

Book:Les Miserables Volume One

Source: Les Miserables Volume One

“The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.”

Suffering Fear Moral Class Poverty Worst Civilization Disease Educated Middle Class Ending Poverty

Book:Writings, 1902-1910

Source: Writings, 1902-1910

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

War Political Politics Winning Class Poverty Rich Inequality Warfare Class Struggle Class Warfare Wealth Inequality Class Conflict

Author:Warren Buffett

“I grew up in the midst of poverty but every black kid that I knew could read and write. We have to talk about the fact that we cannot educate for critical consciousness if we have a group of people who cannot access Fanon, Cabral, or Audre Lorde because they can’t read or write. How did Malcolm X radicalize his consciousness? He did it through books. If you deprive working-class and poor black people of access to reading and writing, you are making them that much farther removed from being a class that can engage in revolutionary resistance.”

“The best anti-poverty program is a world-class education.”

World Class Poverty Program World Class

Author:Barack Obama