Romanticizing Poverty Quotes

I looked harder at Matthew 25 and realized that if  Jesus said "I was hungry and you fed me," then Christ's presence is not embodied in those who feed the hungry (as important as that work is), but Christ's presence is in the hungry being fed. Christ comes not in the form of those who visit the imprisoned but in the imprisoned being cared for. And to be clear, Christ does not come to us as the poor and hungry. Because, as anyone for whom the poor are not an abstraction but actual flesh-and-blood people knows, the poor and hungry and imprisoned are not a romantic special class of  Christlike people. And those who meet their needs are not a romantic special class of  Christlike people. We all are equally as sinful and saintly as the other. No, Christ comes to us in the needs of the poor and hungry, needs that are met by another so that the gleaming redemption of  God might be known. ... No one gets to play Jesus. But we do get to experience Jesus in that holy place where we meet others' needs and have our own needs met. ~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live. ~ George Bernard Shaw

People.. were poor not because they were stupid or lazy. They worked all day long, doing complex physical tasks. They were poor because the financial institution in the country did not help them widen their economic base. ~ Muhammad Yunus

Communism is a hateful thing and a menace to peace and organized government; but the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil, which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wild disorder the citadel of rule. ~ Grover Cleveland

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. ~ Lillian B. Rubin

I believe that the emphasis on curbing population growth diverts attention from the more vital issue of pursuing policies that allow the population to take care of itself. ~ Muhammad Yunus

For me, unemployment and poverty in the Greater Montreal area is not mainly a problem of structure, or design, or statistics. It is a profoundly human situation. ~ Kim Campbell

All the nations that make up the world are burdened down with riches or poverty, obesity or malnutrition, success or failure. ~ Billy Graham

A mature society is one that reserves its moral outrage for what really matters: poverty and preventable diseases in the third world, arms sales, oppression, injustice. Bad language and sex might offend some, who certainly have a right to complain; but they do not have a right to censor. They do not have to watch or listen if they are offended: they have an 'off' button on their television sets and radios. After all, it is morally outrageous that moral outrage should be used as an excuse to perpetrate the outrage of censorship on others. ~ A.C. Grayling

I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity, and I am more invulnerable than Archilles; Fortune hath not one place to hit me. ~ Thomas Browne

An exclusive person hates ugliness, discomfort, enemies, sickness, poverty, ignorance. He finally concludes that there is no God and give himself over to abandonment. ~ Michio Kushi

Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's Dhina, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty than ever in human history. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Loneliness is the ultimate poverty. ~ Pauline Phillips

Turn down things that are in consistence with your priorities. ~ Sunday Adelaja

The best way to detect the destructive element in someone is to watch closely their behavioural pattern when given authority over poverty. ~ Michael Bassey Johnson

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn't have to be another country. It can be the past instead - the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks.
This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines? ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Sometimes, when you grow up in one of these poverty-stricken neighborhoods where the educational system isn't the best, you don't realize that you have any choices. ~ Keke Palmer

Relentlessly feeding on poverty and economic dislocation, a New World Order was taking shape. ~ Michel Chossudovsky

When a man is rich, whether in gold or in knowledge, he must treat the poverty of others with consideration. ~ Amin Maalouf

Coming generations will learn equality from poverty, and love from woes. ~ Kahlil Gibran

The mounting burden of taxation not only undermines individual incentives to increased work and earnings, but in a score of ways discourages capital accumulation and distorts, unbalances, and shrinks production. Total real wealth and income is made smaller than it would otherwise be. On net balance there is more poverty rather than less. ~ Henry Hazlitt

Good clothes, when put to the test, survive a change in fortune, as a Roman arch survives the luxury of departed empire. ~ Arnold Bennett

What's happened here, Sayid? There never used to be such begging."
"You are right," he said. "I believe they have learned this thing from those in the city. People come back from Nairobi or Kisumu and tell them, 'You are poor.' So now we have this idea of poverty. We didn't have this idea before. You look at my mother. She will never ask for anything. She has always something that she is doing. None of it brings much money, but it is something, you see. It gives her pride. Anyone could do the same, but many people here, they prefer to give up. ~ Barack Obama

What I would say to the young men and women who are beset by hopelessness and doubt is that they should go and see what is being done on the ground to fight poverty, not like going to the zoo but to take action, to open their hearts and their consciences. ~ Abbe Pierre

Historically, many southern white churches have not been places of comfort. In fact, as Ernest Kurtz observes in his essay "The Tragedy of Southern Religion," "through all these - slavery, defeat, poverty, and more - the southern white Christian churches have remained singularly blind to the nature and meaning of tragedy and thus also to the significance of suffering." Fear, defensiveness, distrust, and conformity have too often been their currency. Conformity, specifically, necessitated a strict moral code, while evangelicalism required proselytizing and conversion. Together they established a sacred canopy in the region, whereby homogeneity and the sheer volume of believers shields them from pluralism, diversity, resistance, and a reactionary backlash. ~ Angie Maxwell

Michael Corleone understood for the first time why men like his father chose to become thieves and murderers rather than members of the legal society. The poverty and fear and degradation were too awful to be acceptable to any man of spirit. ~ Mario Puzo

How well a posse policy will fare in a world with 3 billion people below the poverty line and nuclear warheads scattered around a dozen or more regions like melons in a field, is not easy to imagine. ~ Herbert Schiller

But if one examines the fine shades of postwar Soviet poverty, ~ Masha Gessen

My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right. ~ James McBride

Poverty ... It is life near the bone, where it is sweetest. ~ Henry David Thoreau

It's going to take an act of Congress to deal with poverty and hunger, not only in this country, but throughout the world. We have the resources but we don't have the will. ~ Coretta Scott King

The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors.
They all need to go on safari together. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

The Poor is no longer not just having enough, but poverty is in fact, not having more than the debts you owe!!! - - The Credit Repair Book: The Credit Repair Company's Secret Weapon. ~ Cornelius J.

It is as my father says. Men are meant to be ruled. The poor man prefers to associate, in mind if not in body, with the rich and successful. He rarely allows himself to consider that his poverty and his neighbor's riches are inextricably linked, for this would require action, and it is easier for him to think of all the reasons he is superior to his other neighbors, who are just poorer than he is. ~ Philipp Meyer

We may wonder what is going on in the back of the mind and what betides in the mood of some people who live on the edge of isolation and emotional poverty. They belong to life's outcasts: deserted by affection, deprived of physical or lingual contact and finally reduced to silence. ("Why didn't he ask ? ") ~ Erik Pevernagie

My pop always said poverty fucks with you... makes you think you can do things you really can't and start selling your soul for things that are priceless. ~ J.J. McAvoy

I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence. ~ Eugene V. Debs

The best way to fight poverty is to empower people through access to quality education ~ John Legend

We may excuse the spiritual poverty of our preaching in many ways, but the true secret will be found in the lack of urgent prayer for God's presence in the power of the Holy Spirit. ~ Edward McKendree Bounds

[L]et us imagine a mirror image of what is happening today. What if millions of white Americans were pouring across the border into Mexico, taking over parts of cities, speaking English rather than Spanish, celebrating the Fourth of July rather than Cinco de Mayo, sleeping 20 to a house, demanding bilingual instruction and welfare for immigrants, opposing border control, and demanding ballots in English? What if, besides this, they had high rates of crime, poverty, and illegitimacy? Can we imagine the Mexicans rejoicing in their newfound diversity?
And yet, that is what Americans are asked to do. For whites to celebrate diversity is to celebrate their own declining numbers and influence, and the transformation of their society. For every other group, to celebrate diversity is to celebrate increasing numbers and influence. Which is a real celebration and which is self-deception?
Whites - but only whites - must never take pride in their own people. Only whites must pretend they do not prefer to associate with people like themselves. Only whites must pretend to be happy to give up their neighborhoods, their institutions, and their country to people unlike themselves. Only whites must always act as individuals and never as members of a group that promotes shared interests.
Racial identity comes naturally to all non-white groups. It comes naturally because it is good, normal, and healthy to feel kinship for people like oneself. Despite the fashionable view that race ~ Jared Taylor

Blacks are about seven times more likely to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty than whites. ~ John A. Powell

The day that hunger is eradicated from the earth there will be the greatest spiritual explosion the world has ever known. Humanity cannot imagine the joy that will burst into the world. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca