#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

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

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

If we are not being maligned, scandalizing those who still sleep in the church, then we are missing the incarnational call to love the world's most vulnerable, the world's exiled, the world's most wounded. Our concern should be what the poor and prostituted think of us, what the God of the universe thinks of us, not what those around us think of us. ↗

— Sarah Lance

#caring #church #compassion #excile #god

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

To me, the poor are like Bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a six-inch deep flower pot, you get a perfect replica of the tallest tree, but it is only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted; only the soil-base you provided was inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with their seeds. Only society never gave them a base to grow on. ↗

— Muhammad Yunus

#microfinance #poverty #social-business #society #business

If you go out into the real world, you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate but because they cannot retain the returns of their labor. They have no control over capital, and it is the ability to control capital that gives people the power to rise out of poverty. ↗

— Muhammad Yunus

#poverty #poverty-alleviation #social-change #change