Quotes about Poverty

To put the issue bluntly, are the Beatitudes true? If so, why doesn't the church encourage poverty and mourning and meekness and persecution instead of striving against them? What is the real meaning of the Beatitudes, this cryptic ethical core of Jesus' teaching?

Make it so the poor are no longer despised and thrown away. Look at them standing about — like wildflowers, which have nowhere else to grow.

Homeless people bear God's image too.

one East European Christian observed, "You Western Christians often seem to consider material prosperity to be the only sign of God's blessing. On the other hand, you often seem to perceive poverty, discomfort, and suffering as signs of God's disfavor. In some ways we in the East understand suffering from the opposite perspective. We believe that suffering may be a sign of God's favor and trust in the Christians to whom the trial is permitted to come.

Corruption is Africa's greatest problem. Not poverty. Not lack of riches. Not racism.

The poor who commit murder, rape and robbery are not only not starving, they have far more material things than the word 'poverty' suggests.

In 2008, then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama told an audience, "Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools, and twenty times more likely to end up in prison.

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

A soul who loves Jesus Christ desires to be treated the way Christ was treated-desires to be poor, despised, and humiliated.

The best anti-poverty program is a world-class education.

Here we see how the plantation, which does not create employment for its inhabitants, nevertheless does provide stable employment to a whole class of academics, social workers and bureaucrats. The employment is stable because the plantation is permanent; there are no plans for it to ever be dismantled. The "war against poverty" is a perpetual fight in which poverty always wins because the game is rigged and the combatants are not fighting to win, only to hold the line.

Pine Ridge reservation, White Face told me, is one of the largest reservations in the country, and the poorest. Like other reservations, it is run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), an agency of the federal government. While in theory the native Indians are separate nations, in reality they are, as the Supreme Court once termed them, "dependent nations"—dependent on the government through the BIA.