#overt

Poverty is restriction and as such, it is the greatest injustice you can perpetrate upon yourself. ↗

— Stuart Wilde

#injustice #perpetrate #poverty #restriction #such

I came from a very poor family and my main dream in life was to break out of this poverty. ↗

— Viktor Yanukovych

#came #dream #family #i #i came

The wealth of a soul is measured by how much it can feel; its poverty by how little. ↗

— William R. Alger

#how #little #measured #much #poverty

Even today we don't pay serious attention to the issue of poverty, because the powerful remain relatively untouched by it. Most people distance themselves from the issue by saying that if the poor worked harder, they wouldn't be poor. ↗

— Muhammad Yunus

#poverty #social-change #change

The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty -- it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God. ↗

— Mother Teresa

#love #medicine #poverty #spirituality #uncaring

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#activism #evil #poverty #life

He seems so frivolous and so careless, but he gives money to beggars, not frivolously or carelessly, but because he believes in giving money to beggars, and giving it to them “where they stand”. He says he knows perfectly well all the arguments against giving money to beggars. But he finds those to be precisely the arguments for giving money to them. If beggars are lazy or deceptive or wanting a drink, he knows only too well his own lack of motivation, his own dishonesty, his own thirst. He doesn’t believe in “scientific charity” because that is too easy, as easy as writing a check. He believes in “promiscuous charity” because that is really difficult. “It means the most dark and terrible of all human actions—talking to a man. In fact, I know of nothing more difficult than really talking to the poor men we meet.” (pp. 13-14) ↗

— Dale Ahlquist

#social-justice #men

We must powder our wigs; that is why so many poor people have no bread. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#poverty #poverty

To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes. ↗

— Jane Jacobs

#prosperity #poverty

Society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy; those who had anything united in common terror. ↗

— Alexis de Tocqueville

#terror #poverty