It’s great to see countries like China and India lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by essentially copying Western ways of doing things.

In Paris there are two dens, one for thieves, the other for murderers. The den of thieves is the Stock Exchange; the den of murderers is the Courthouse.

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

I hate my country. There are so many rich people who don’t share their shit. They’re like spoiled little ten-year-old bullies on the playground. They hog the monkey bars and the slide and the seesaw....

Oh, man, why is this the life? Why is it? Why is one rich and the other poor? Why is one black and the other white?

how did you end up there?” Americans, it seems, find comfort in reasons and explanations. They honestly believe that if they can find the reason for someone else’s misfortune, they can avoid that misfortune themselves....

So why is a third of our world battling obesity and spending huge sums to burn off excess calories, while the other two-thirds yearn to get more of them?

We must arm ourselves with patience and wisdom and listen to the poor what they want. This is the best way to avoid the trap of ignorance, ideology and inertia on our side.

Make a commitment to serve the needs of the ‘least of these’ and give voice to the voiceless.

In rural and struggling Lexington, Virginia, Lee’s new postwar home, one writer joked darkly dollars were so scarce that they had to be introduced to one another when they met on Main Street.

It is also in the interests of the tyrant to make his subjects poor… the people are so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for plotting.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

I died last night. Seventy years too young.

I hate the smell of success, because most of the time it smells like sweat. Maybe that’s why I’m poor, because every pore on my body is dry.

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...

They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar

I’m rich in poverty. I got no money coming out of my ass. I’m up to my neck in broke.

As I grew into womanhood my confusion at the world became more apparent. I was taking comfort in behaviours that were familiar, not bathing, wearing multiple layers of clothes and, like my mother, I was...

Tell your wives and your older children to bring with them dish pans and cooking pots. Tell them to bring their stirring spoons and ladles. Tell them to carry a mop over their shoulders. We’re...

A poor man is not disposed to quick and high resentment when he is among the rich: he is apt to yield to others, for he knows others are above him: he is not stiff...

The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever...

.. becoming attached to a country involves pressing, uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens.

You can’t eat straight A’s.

Nothing awakens the conscience like a lot of money.

Most families around town only had a bottle of aspirin in their medicine cabinets. If you had the flu, you took an aspirin. If you had a toothache, you took an aspirin. If you were...

Rich people read their bills. Poor people dread theirs.

As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.

She had spears of straw and grass in her hair, not like Ophelia gone mad through contact with Hamlet’s madness, but because she had slept in some stable loft.

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.

The faith a movement proclaims doesn’t count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle...

Such a little childTo send to be a priestling…Icy poverty

Tipsy, they tumbled early into bed – to get as much sleep as they could. So they would feel less hunger. The summer catch had been poor; there wasn’t much food. They ate with care...

The difference between the rich and the poor, is finding true love.

I think the impetus is still there. This continent cannot be allowed to die nightly in the pornography of poverty that is our news screens.

Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.

Statistics show that the nature of English crime is reverting to its oldest habits. In a country where so many desire status and wealth, petty annoyances can spark disproportionately violent behaviour. We become frustrated because...

Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor

Unprovoked hostility is often but displaced self-defense: ‘I must stop him before he stops me.’ In many of such environments, nobody is really hateful so much as they are just fearful.

It takes nothing to stay in poverty, but everything to break free from it.

And every historic effort to forge a democratic project has been undermined by two fundamental realities: poverty and paranoia. The persistence of poverty generates levels of despair that deepen social conflict the escalation of paranoia...

Mere inflation-that is, the mere issuance of more money, with the consequence of higher wages and prices-may look like the creation of more demand. But in terms of the actual production and exchange of real...

At the end of the school day, we walked the long, cold way home feeling happy and hungry. There we found a warm fire, country ham with gravy and hot biscuits, and a mother to...

The walls were chipped and needed paint. The windows were mostly okay but one pane was blocked with cardboard. There were fleas the exterminator couldn’t kill and rats that scrabbled in the walls and mice...

Denying or discouraging access to banking services is part of the cycle of poverty that undermines the foundation of our city. We’re concerned that Fifth Third isn’t living up to its commitment to the community.

Poverty doesn’t say so much about God as it says about us.

To me, the poor are like Bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a six-inch deep flower pot, you get a perfect replica of the tallest tree, but it...

Poverty is not a disgrace, but it’s terribly inconvenient

Even though he’d been born into a country unshackling itself from its colonial masters, even though he’d lived through nearly twenty years of freedom, nothing much changed for you when you were poor.

I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how...

I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy’s sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had...