Quotes about Poverty

The early church was married to poverty, prisons and persecutions. Today, the church is married to prosperity, personality, and popularity.

The world's poorest people use the cheapest available fuels - dung and twigs and even leaves.

I teach at Eastern University, which is highly committed to doing work among the poor and the oppressed peoples of the world. We have a special commitment to the city.

I think Liberty students ought to date a lot without commitment in mind. If you're thinking commitment - and you probably shouldn't until you're a senior - you don't want to start your marriage off under the constraints of poverty and schooling.

If everyone who wants to see an end to poverty, hunger and suffering speaks out, then the noise will be deafening.

Most poor people I know are proud and really want not a handout but a hand up. They do have an inherent pride and dignity, and we should treat them as those who have fallen on bad days.

In serving the poor, one serves humanity.In serving mankind, one serves equity.In serving goodness, one serves God.In serving the Creator, one serves himself.

When people are kept in abject poverty and illiteracy while others grow rich and "develop their personalities" at the former's expense we speak of oppression; when structures and persons that perpetuate powerlessness are replaced by structures that allow people to stand on their own feet and have their own voice, we speak of liberation.2 Both

A great poet has correctly stated this universal truth through these lines: "I bargained with Life for a penny, And Life would pay no more, However I begged at evening When I counted my scanty store. "For Life is a just employer, He gives you what you ask, But once you have set the wages, Why, you must bear the task. "I worked for a menial's hire, Only to learn, dismayed, That any wage I had asked of Life, Life would have willingly paid.

Cease your complaining and fretting; none of these things which you blame are the cause of your poverty; the cause is within yourself, and where the cause is, there is the remedy. The very fact that you are a complainer, shows that you deserve your lot; shows that you lack that faith which is the ground of all effort and progress.

Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. Letter to James Madison, October 28, 1785

Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed.