#poverty

America stands as a beacon of hope and the possibility of a better life - but it is also a nation where nearly 1 in 4 children live in poverty. ↗

— Chris Van Hollen

#america #beacon #better #better life #children

A rich man cannot enjoy a sound mind nor a sound body without exercise and abstinence; and yet these are truly the worst ingredients of poverty. ↗

— Henry Home

#body #cannot #enjoy #exercise #ingredients

Our poverty will be brought home to us to its full extent only after the war. ↗

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

#brought #extent #full #home #only

That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms. ↗

— Khaled Hosseini

#cring #fables #greed #poverty #sorrow

It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country. ↗

— Paul Farmer

#poverty #rights #science #science

Hunger and necessity are poor teachers of morality. A society that cannot provide the basics of life does not get its laws obeyed. ↗

— A.J. Quinnell

#laws #poverty #societal-breakdown #society #life

Real poverty is when hunger pangs force from my mind all thoughts but those of food. Real poverty is when the children are not dressed warmly enough for winter. Real poverty is when the housing we can afford is not adequate to the needs of our families. On the other hand, real poverty is - equally - when I have eaten so much that I am uncomfortable, and again, my thoughts center on food. Or when I have so many clothes that I have to spend a lot of mental energy making choices among them or finding ways to store them. Or when, regardless of my living conditions, I am discontent and brooding about how to have more. Real poverty is when material things are uppermost and pressing - whether because we have too few or too many of them. It is poverty, because the human mind and spirit are made for higher things, worthier pursuits. ↗

— Maxine Hancock

#poverty #prosperity #wealth #equality

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

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

#colonialism #imperialism #inequality #poverty #race