I grew up in an era of pretty severe poverty. My parents weathered the Great Depression, and money was always a very big concern. I was weaned on a shortage mentality and placed in foster homes largely because there simply wasn’t enough money to take care of the most basic of needs.

We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace.

Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it. We do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off – we do not have to stand for this.

In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

Yes, we’ve still got more work to do. More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who has not yet felt the progress of these past seven and a half years.

More than 820 million people in the world suffer from hunger; and 790 million of them live in the Third World.

These days there is a lot of poverty in the world, and that’s a scandal when we have so many riches and resources to give to everyone. We all have to think about how we can become a little poorer.

Life is an ordeal, albeit an exciting one, but I wouldn’t trade it for the good old days of poverty and obscurity.

The poor don’t know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

To give aid to every poor man is far beyond the reach and power of every man. Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole.

I grew up in the east side of Detroit in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. I never woke up saying, ‚I’m an orphan again today, isn’t this terrible? Poor me.‘

If you’re totally illiterate and living on one dollar a day, the benefits of globalization never come to you.

Most poor people live in the poorest countries.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, ‚What are we going to do?‘ but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that’s nothing.

The old-fashioned idea is that responsibility falls upon those who borrow and lend. Money was not borrowed by campesinos, assembly plant workers, or slum-dwellers. The mass of the population gained little from borrowing, indeed often suffered grievously from its effects.

As a kid, I got three meals a day. Oatmeal, miss-a-meal and no meal.

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.

The main message of Climate Revolution is that climate change is caused by the rotten financial system we’ve got, designed to create poverty and rip off any profits for a small amount of rich people. Meanwhile, it destroys the earth.

Giving a poor person money keeps them poor.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.

If you’re in trouble, or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.

When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

The problem is that the U.S. government is the biggest debtor in the world, and those depending on it to take care of them will only become poorer.

Oh, how I would like a poor Church, and for the poor.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

There is nothing I fear more than waking up without a program that will help me bring a little happiness to those with no resources, those who are poor, illiterate, and ridden with terminal disease.

Coming generations will learn equality from poverty, and love from woes.

It’s difficult to believe that people are still starving in this country because food isn’t available.

He who has made a fair compact with poverty is rich.

Our life of poverty is as necessary as the work itself. Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God better because of them.

You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.

But Satan now is wiser than of yore, and tempts by making rich, not making poor.

Every time there has been an effort by the Haitian people to overcome the misery and poverty that comes from 200 years of bitter attacks, really bitter, the U.S. steps in and blocks it.

There are many people in South Africa who are rich and who can share those riches with those not so fortunate who have not been able to conquer poverty.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

My entire childhood was steeped in poverty. For me, poverty, in a way, was the first inspiration of my life, a commitment to do something for the poor.

Poverty is the mother of crime.

I was born January 6, 1937, eight years after Wall Street crashed and two years before John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the plight of a family during the Great Depression.

We were poor, but we smiled.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

You cannot spend money in luxury without doing good to the poor. Nay, you do more good to them by spending it in luxury, than by giving it; for by spending it in luxury, you make them exert industry, whereas by giving it, you keep them idle.

The lack of money is the root of all evil.

The biggest and most deadly ‚tax‘ rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits – food stamps, housing subsidies and the like – if their income goes up.

No one is so miserable as the poor person who maintains the appearance of wealth.

I’d go to, like, six different schools in one year. We were on welfare, and my mom never ever worked.

I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn’t touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.

Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the population into the richest 20% than remain in the poorest bracket within the decade? You don’t need to imagine it. It’s called the United States of America.

Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.

What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.

Happiness is within the reach of everyone, rich or poor. Yet comparatively few people are happy. I believe the reason for this is that the majority don’t recognize happiness even when it is within their grasp.

It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have nothing.