#poverty

Poverty should not be viewed by us as a humiliation and even less so as a position of honour or a fatality. ↗

— Mathieu Kerekou

#fatality #honour #humiliation #less #position

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential. ↗

— Barack Obama

#asks #because #buck #certain #focusing

We need to steer clear of this poverty of ambition, where people want to drive fancy cars and wear nice clothes and live in nice apartments but don't want to work hard to accomplish these things. Everyone should try to realize their full potential. ↗

— Barack Obama

#ambition #cars #clear #clothes #drive

If that's your definition of the Clinton faction, then I think that that seems to be in ascendancy. That might include a guy like John Edwards, who's just starting this new center in Chapel Hill to deal with issues of poverty and work. ↗

— John Podesta

#center #chapel #chapel hill #clinton #deal

The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival. ↗

— Adrienne Rich

#become #callousness #cheapen #child #common

It has to have a payroll tax that's dedicated to Social Security. The Social Security tax has been very successful over the years in raising almost all of our elderly citizens out of poverty. ↗

— James Roosevelt

#been #citizens #dedicated #elderly #our

When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences. ↗

— Muhammad Yunus

#poor #poverty #social-change #change

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

How reprehensible it is when those blessed with commodities insist on ignoring the poor. Better to torment them, force them into indentured servitude, inflict compulsion and blows—this at least produces a connection, fury and a pounding heart, and these too constitute a form of relationship. But to cower in elegant homes behind golden garden gates, fearful lest the breath of warm humankind touch you, unable to indulge in extravagances for fear they might be glimpsed by the embittered oppressed, to oppress and yet lack the courage to show yourself as an oppressor, even to fear the ones you are oppressing, feeling ill at ease in your own wealth and begrudging others their ease, to resort to disagreeable weapons that require neither true audacity nor manly courage, to have money, but only money, without splendor: That’s what things look like in our cities at present ↗

— Robert Walser

#class-warfare #courage #cowardice #inequality #money

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