Third World Poverty Quotes

Fleecing the Third World has been a reality for decades if not centuries. Mineral-abundant Third World nations, which should be some of the richest on Earth, are all too often among the poorest. Many argue that the poverty of these nations can usually be blamed on wars strategically engineered by developed nations and Superpowers – wars that are also armed and funded by the developed world. ~ James Morcan

Maybe your college professor taught that the legacy of colonialism explains Third World poverty. That's nonsense as well. Canada was a colony. So were Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. In fact, the richest country in the world, the United States, was once a colony. By contrast, Ethiopia, Liberia, Tibet, Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan were never colonies, but they are home to the world's poorest people. ~ Walter Williams

Under normal circumstances, if the centerpiece of a president's campaign is helping the disadvantaged and we are our brother's keeper, the idea that this same guy has an actual brother living in third-world poverty without any help from Obama, this would have been on the cover of 'The New York Times.' But none of them are touching it. ~ Dinesh D'Souza

Modernized by tin roofs and T-shirts, Third World poverty is no longer picturesque. ~ Mason Cooley

My claims are not meant to be persuasive, but are used to make intangibility, concrete. I do not make claim for causing acts of God, I simply illustrate the coincidence and proximity of time between my words and acts of God and the exact date and time of said claims can never be changed because this data was recorded by International Press Releases. Being a scientist automatically makes me a reliable, objective and intellectual source but what gives me more credibility than the average scientist, is the fact that these claims are completely independent from myself for the fact they were recorded by an unbiased and independent third-party (i.e., The Library of Congress and PRLog.org). Therefore, there is no possible debate regarding the validity of this information, unless of course the debate is over whether the world is flat or round. ~ Alejandro C. Estrada

If Roosevelt didn't have World War II, he never would have had a third term. ~ Robert Dallek

I listened - much as you're listening now, Dick, but it wasn't from curiosity, it was something more. I hated the thought of this world that must be lived in - the sordid pitiful lives of men and women, who can't get beyond their own bodies. I could see this girl, living as she did without the excuse of poverty - she wasn't any prostitute having to keep herself, but spoiling her beauty, her health, and her own precious individuality, which is greater than anything in life, Dick, because some man had taught her to be self-indulgent. There wasn't anything more in it than that. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

You don't have to get rich to have [fewer] children. It has happened across the world. ~ Hans Rosling

As the Great rise by degrees of Greatnesse to the Pitch of Glory, so the Miserable sink to the Depth of their Misery by a continued Series of Disasters. Yet it cannot be denied but most Men owe not only their Learning to their Plenty, but likewise their Vertue and their Honesty: for how many Thousands are there in the World, in great Reputation for their Sober and Just dealings with Mankind, who if they were put to their Shifts would soon lose their Reputations and turn Rogues and Scoundrels? And yet we punish Poverty as if it were Crime, and honour Wealth as if it were a Vertue. And so goes on the Circle of Things: Poverty begets Sin and Sin begets Punishment. ~ Peter Ackroyd

What does hanging on a cross for twenty-four hours mean to a man who has no children,' I said, 'especially when he knows he's dying for a good cause -- indeed, that he's saving the whole world and then going straight into the best place in Heaven? What's that compared to the suffering I've had to put up with for months and years with the house full of children, when for many whole nights I've shrieked with pain unceasingly and without relief, and I'll soon be dead, and that without having anything to die for; and there'll be no heavenly Kingdom for me, for I know the children will go on crying when I'm dead, and swearing and quarrelling, and begging for milk they can't get. ~ Halldor Laxness

Between 1965 (the beginning of LBJ's "Great Society") and 1994, welfare spending has cost the taxpayers $5.4 trillion in constant 1993 dollars. The War on Poverty has cost us 70 % more than the total price tag for defeating both Germany and Japan in World War II, after adjusting for inflation. Many believe that Welfare has destroyed millions of families and cost a huge portion of our national wealth in the process. ~ Rush Limbaugh

Welcome to Barrayar, son. Here you go: have a world of wealth and poverty, wrenching change and rooted history. Have a birth; have two. Have a name. Miles means "soldier," but don't let the power of suggestion overwhelm you. Have a twisted form in a society that loathes and fears the mutations that have been its deepest agony. Have a title, wealth, power, and all the hatred and envy they will draw. Have your body ripped apart and re-arranged. Inherit an array of friends and enemies you never made. Have a grandfather from hell. Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it. Always be a moving target. Live. Live. Live. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

If we just stop producing stuff, if we stop being so capitalist, we stop taking resources from other third world countries, we'll be happy. ~ Glenn Beck

I believe the quickest and most sure way to reduce poverty, raise living standards and create jobs around the world is to make economies and governments more open and free, thereby encouraging business and entrepreneurship. ~ Elliott Bisnow

So before and during the war, the Bush administration had to build up an image in people's minds of Iraq as a monstrous military superpower, in order to mobilize enough popular hysteria so that people here would go along with their policies. And again, the media did their job 100 percent. So I don't know how well you remember what was going on around the country back then, but people were literally quaking in their boots about the extraordinary might of Iraq―it was a superpower with artillery we'd never dreamt of, all this kind of stuff.93 I mean, this was a defenseless Third World country that was so weak it had been unable to defeat post-revolutionary Iran in eight years of warfare [from 1980 to '88]―and that was with the support of the United States, the Soviet Union, all of Europe, the Arab oil countries: not an inconsiderable segment of world power. Yet with all those allies, Iraq had been unable to defeat post-revolutionary Iran, which had killed off its own officers' corps and barely had an army left: all of a sudden this was the superpower that was going to conquer the world? You really had to be a deeply brainwashed Western intellectual even to look at this image―a defenseless Third World country threatening the two most advanced military forces in the world, the United States and Britain―and not completely collapse in ridicule. But as you recall, that's what all of them were saying―and people here really believed it. ~ Noam Chomsky

But still, it was not the desire to 'write' that was his real motive. To get out of the money-world - that was what he wanted. Vaguely he looked forward to some kind of moneyless, anchorite existence. He had a feeling that if you genuinely despise money you can keep going somehow, like the birds of the air. He forgot that the birds of the air don't pay room-rent. The poet starving in a garret - but starving, somehow, not uncomfortably - that was his vision of himself.

The next seven months were devastating. They scared him and almost broke his spirit. He learned what it means to live for weeks on end on bread and margarine, to try to 'write' when you are half starved, to pawn your clothes, to sneak trembling up the stairs when you owe three weeks' rent and your landlady is listening for you. Moreover, in those seven months he wrote practically nothing. The first effect of poverty is that it kills thought. He grasped, as though it were a new discovery, that you do not escape from money merely by being moneyless. On the contrary, you are the hopeless slave of money until you have enough of it to live on - a 'competence', as the beastly middle-class phrase goes. ~ George Orwell

Twenty-nine years old and on her third masters degree because she's afraid to go out and meet the world. Sad, isn't it?" Mal sighed. "Tragic. ~ James Ellroy

Before this learning experience, I had assumed that with regard to programs that sought to help people out of poverty, the political world was essentially divided into two camps: conservatives who opposed these for a variety of reasons, and liberals who supported them. ~ Barney Frank

And while we stand with conviction and courage, we must live with compassion. Amid a world with massive social needs around us, ranging from desperate poverty and orphan crises and millions of girls being trafficked for sex, to the degradation of marriage and the abortion of babies, we need to speak and act with selfless love on all of these issues. ~ David Platt

a prosperous country with higher wage rates per unit of time may have lower labor costs per unit of output than a Third World country where workers are not paid nearly as much. ~ Anonymous

In the course of his long, turbulent career, W. E. B. Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism ... scholarship, propaganda, integration, national self-determination, human rights, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation, third world solidarity. ~ David Levering Lewis

The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can't let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are. ~ Michael Oppenheimer

To have an inner life, to think, to juggle and leap, to become a tightrope walker in the world of ideas. To attack, to riposte, to refute, what a contest, what acclaim. To understand. The most generous word of all. Memory. To retain, a geyser of felicity. Intelligence. The agonizing poverty of my mind. Words and ideas flitting in and out like butterflies. My brain a dandelion seed blown in the wind. ~ Violette Leduc

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it the second time. ~ Thomas Jefferson

To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators. ~ Lewis H. Lapham

To say 'I want to have sex with this person' is to express a desire which is not intellectually directed in the way that 'I want to eradicate poverty in the world' is an intellectually directed desire. Furthernore, the gratification of sexual desire can only ever give temporary satisfaction. Thus as Nagarjuna, the great Indian scholar said: 'When you have an itch, you scratch. But not to itch at all is better than any amount of scratching. ~ Dalai Lama XIV

First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts. Everyone has those. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those. Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They're rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft. ~ Terry Pratchett

As if the weather knew the calendar the last day of August broke with a hard killing frost. Where the sun fell the world spangled, autumn arriving in glacial brilliance, almost suggesting snow over the grass and low shrubbery. Where the sun has not yet struck it was ghostly, a pewter finish over the sagging grass and wilted goldenrod stems. The pods of milkweed were brittle and broke open to release their slight spherical webs of seed onto any straggle of breeze. Smoke streamed white straight up from chimney tops and mist obscured the lake, hanging in sheets of cold vapor that disintegrated slowly from the top down as the sun came over the hills. A third-quarter moon hung against the endless fathoms of a colbalt heaven, the moon a quartzite river stone. ~ Jeffrey Lent

Three plagues, three contagions, threaten the world.
The first is the plague of nationalism.
The second is the plague of racism.
The third is the plague of religious fundamentalism.
All three share one trait, a common denominator--an aggressive, all-powerful, total irrationality. Anyone stricken with one of these plagues is beyond reason. In his head burns a sacred pyre that awaits its sacrificial victims. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski

Christian theism, to those who believe it, commends itself as fact, not theory, by the sheer multiplicity of its bearings. Were it a speculation, it would surely face a single field of enquiry: it would assign the cause of the world, or the principle of duty, or the aim of existence, or the means of spiritual regeneration. If an equal light falls from a single source in all these directions at once, that source must seem to have the richness of a reality, rather than the abstract poverty of an idea. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

I hear all the time that peace activists are naive, that it is impossible to talk to extremists--people who have no regard for the lives of innocents... But in my experience in conflict zones the world over, there are always people to talk to. From members of Hamas in Gaza to Baathists under Saddam's Iraq to the Taliban in Afganistan to government officials in Iran, it is a major blunder to label all our perceived enemies as extremists incapable of rational conversation. People join militant groups for many reasons--religious, family, social pressure, revenge for some wrong they experienced, political ideology, poverty. With such diversity of motives, the are always some people who can be enticed to talk about peace. Our goal should be to seek them out, to strengthen the moderates. Unfortunately, our actions have only served to embolden the extremists. ~ Medea Benjamin

Man's poverty is abysmal, his wants are endless till he becomes truly conscious of his soul. Till then, the world to him is in a state of flux - a phantasm that is and is not. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

The basic distortions in the media are not innocent errors, for they are not random; rather they move in the same overall direction again and again, favoring management over labor, corporatism over anti-corporatism, the affluent over the poor, private enterprise over socialism, Whites over Blacks, males over females, officialdom over protesters, conventional politics over dissidence, anticommunism and arms-race militarism over disarmament, national chauvinism over internationalism, US dominance of the Third World over revolutionary or populist nationalist change. The press does many things and serves many functions but its major role, its irreducible responsibility, is to continually recreate a view of reality supportive of existing social and economic class power. ~ Michael Parenti

Finally, a prominent nation is taking on the homosexual agenda and rejecting it outright. A number of African nations have done the same, but third-world countries are not newsworthy to mainstream media. The irony is stunning that a Communist nation would understand that preserving the value of men and women marrying and producing children makes for demographic survival, while many American Christian leaders cower in the shadows, in fear of activist homosexuals and their leftist supporters. I say 'cheers' to the Russians on this one. That nation will probably outlive America. ~ Sylvia Thompson

These self-styled reformers in the present-day Muslim countries may be recognized by their pride in what they should rather be ashamed of, and their shame in what they should be proud of. These are usually "daddy's sons", schooled in Europe, from which they return with a deep sense of their own inferiority towards the wealthy West and a personal superiority over the poverty-stricken and backward surroundings from which they spring.
They cannot see that the power of the Western world does not lie in how it lives, but in how it works: that its strength is not in fashion, godlessness, night clubs, a younger generation out of control, but in the extraordinary diligence, persistence, knowledge and responsibility of its people. ~ Alija Izetbegovic