#poverty

A community that is growing rich and seeks only to defend its goods and its reputation is dying. It has ceased to grow in love. A community is alive when it is poor and its members feel they have to work together and remain united, if only to ensure that they can all eat tomorrow! ↗

— Jean Vanier

#poverty #wealth #love

By defining the problem as "hunger," the emergency food system is helping to direct our attention away from the more fundamental problem of poverty, and the even more basic problem of inequality. ↗

— Janet Poppendieck

#hunger #inequality #poverty #food

In war," answered the weaver, "the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#love

From books, I winnowed the glue that held together my psyche as it struggled to stay whole. It was from stories and myths that I learned to dream, to imagine a different life, to realize potentials and probabilities other than those of the painful, poverty-mired existence I found myself in as a child. With a book I could hide in a corner, safe from the heavy hand and belt of my stepfather, and for a while not worry about where our next meal would come from, or where we would be sleeping that night, or when my mother would break and have to be sent yet again to the mental institution. Books, for me, we tiny life rafts that I clung to desperately. ↗

— J. Don Cook

#poverty #real-life #dreams

You can find Calcutta anywhere in the world. You only need two eyes to see. Everywhere in the world there are people that are not loved, people that are not wanted nor desired, people that no one will help, people that are pushed away or forgotten. And this is the greatest poverty. ↗

— Mother Teresa

#service #love

Once poverty is gone, we'll need to build museums to display its horrors to future generations. They'll wonder why poverty continued so long in human society - how a few people could live in luxury while billions dwelt in misery, deprivation and despair. ↗

— Muhammad Yunus

#charity #micro-credit #poor #poverty #social-business

(So I heard the boom of my fathr's rifle when he shot my best friend.) A bullet only costs about two cents, and anybody can afford that.(14) ↗

— Sherman Alexie

#death #friendship #poor #poverty #death

This is the basis for the most important critique of microfinance. The poor are not entrepreneurs. The idea that more than a few will turn tiny loans into a viable business is simply unrealistic. ↗

— Ian Smillie

#economics #ian-smillie #microfinance #poor #poverty

[Saying] No to racial injustice means a call to look our own bigotry straight in the eye, and No to world hunger calls upon us to recognize our own lack of poverty. No to war requires us to come to terms with our own violence and aggression, and no to oppression and torture forces us to deal directly with our own insensitivities. And so all our No's become challenges to purify our own hearts. In this sense, confrontation always includes self-confrontation. (p. 123-124) ↗

— Henri J. M. Nouwen Donald P. McNeill Douglas A. Morrison

#confrontation #poverty #racism #self-confrontation #war

When YOU stop believing one person in the world cannot make a difference; differences in the world will be made. ↗

— Kellie Elmore

#change-the-world #homeless #humanity #humanity-and-society #inspiration