c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Some people envied Ronan’s money. Adam envied his time. To be as rich as Ronan was to be able to go to school and do nothing else, to have luxurious swathes of time in which to study and write papers and sleep. Adam wouldn’t admit it to anyone, least of all Gansey, but he was tired. He was tired of squeezing homework in between his part-time jobs, of squeezing in sleep, squeezing in the hunt for Glendower. The jobs felt like so much wasted time: In five years, no one would care if he’d worked at a trailer factory. They’d only care if he’d graduated from Aglionby with perfect grades, or if he’d found Glendower, or if he was still alive. And Ronan didn’t have to worry about any of that.
— Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys
A poor man is a living dead one.
— Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers
...we so resented that asshole up there talking talking talking taking up the entire assembly expecting us to believe there isn't a special creation of God, or of man, to which we didn't belong, here in the shabby south end of Hammond in the worst damn public school in the district, we didn't belong and never would. And what the hell? ---Such truths, FOXFIRE made softer.
— Joyce Carol Oates
One of the major destruction of man is distraction
— Steven Chuks Nwaokeke
It's an insidious twist of thought that leads one to demand women to give up their reproductive rights to force unwanted pregnancies but then, once birthed from the womb, to deny them access to basic necessities required for even a mediocre life like education, clean air, healthcare, and a fair wage. And these people have the audacity to call their position pro-life.These same people who bemoan the welfare state, yet refuse to require business to honor a fair wage, appear to want to create the very circumstances that they ceaselessly complain about. I dare say that by perpetuating this condition, by feeding the apparatus of poverty, they are satiating their narcissism.With poverty securely entrenched, these lucky few can sit back and smile with smug superiority. Because of course, they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, they worked harder, and they have earned what they have. It's a meritocracy, they say, if only by merit of their parent's color of flesh or social standing.So yes, let's churn out more children who will be unable to claw their way out of poverty, and if they just happen to defy the odds, let's brainwash them into believing this tripe called the American Dream so they will assist us as we throw their less fortunate fortunate siblings into the hungry machine of conservatism. Because we are really only interested in conserving the status quo.
— Michael Brewer
I see seven people in one room and one pregnant and people fucking anyway because people so poor that they can’t even afford shame and I wait
— Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings
The Gospel shows people their wounds and bestows on them love. It shows them their bondage and supplies the hammerto knock away their chains. It shows them their nakedness and provides them the garments of purity. It shows them their poverty and pours into their lives the wealth of heaven. It shows them their sins and points them to the Savior.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
I always worried because whenever a drought struck, an accursed storm of blood always followed.
— Bo-Young Kim, Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 104
When they passed a maintenance site in the road bed, Einstein stopped next to a worker who was smashing stones and silently observed this boy with torn clothes and dirty face and hands. He asked your father how much the boy earned each day. After asking the boy, he told Einstein: five cents.
— Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem
It is bad enough when rich Christians show little concern for the poor, but when they moan about their lot, they show contempt not only for the poor but also for the generosity of God.
— Tim Chester, Good News To The Poor
Doing without will wear on you until temptation is stronger than character, sometimes.
— Dan Groat, A Punctual Paymaster
The provisions for the poor which structure both land ownership and the sacred calendar in ancient Israel, the rights of gleaners and of those widows, orphans, and strangers who pass through the fields, and the cycles of freedom from debt and restoration of alienated persons and property, all work against the emergence of the poor as a class, as people marked by deprivation and hopelessness.
— Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books
Every morning, when people are getting up in the tent, the babies are crying, people are pushing each other at the taps outside and some children are already pulling the crusts of porridge off the pots we ate from last night, my first-born brother and I clean our shoes. Our grandmother makes us sit on our mats with our legs straight out so she can look carefully at our shoes to make sure we have done it properly. No other children in the tent have real school shoes. When we three look at them it’s as if we are in a real house again, with no war, no away.
— Nadine Gordimer, The Ultimate Safari
Treatments worked well enough for us to get by. Most people lived into old age, but the medication, like everything else, has never been free. Life was a privilege, not a right, apparently. Something you had to struggle for when you were unlucky enough to be born at the intersection of poverty and bad genes.
— Jacqueline Koyanagi, Ascension
A man may live to be as old as Methuselah,’ said Mr. Filer, ‘and may labour all his life for the benefit of such people as those; and may heap up facts on figures, facts on figures, facts on figures, mountains high and dry; and he can no more hope to persuade ’em that they have no right or business to be married, than he can hope to persuade ’em that they have no earthly right or business to be born. And that we know they haven’t. We reduced it to a mathematical certainty long ago!
— Charles Dickens, The Chimes
Narcissism is as profitable to a model as scruffiness is to a homeless person.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Poverty in a big city is more humiliating and deadening to all the joys of life than it can possibly be elsewhere.
— Albert Bigelow Paine, The Bread Line A Story of a Paper
Poverty and desperation are the parents of ambition. (character Norm Woodruff)
— Phil Valentine, The God Players
I am not wise enough to say how much of all this squalor and wretchedness and hunger is the fault of the people themselves, how much of it belongs to circumstances and environment, how much is the result of past errors of government, how much is race, how much is religion. I only know that children should never be hungry, that there are ignorant human creatures to be taught how to live; and if it is a hard task, the sooner it is begun the better, both for teachers and pupils. It is comparatively easy to form opinions and devise remedies, when one knows the absolute truth of things; but it is so difficult to find the truth here, or at least there are so many and such different truths to weigh in the balance....
— Kate Douglas Wiggin, Penelope's Irish Experiences
Rabbi Hiyya advised his wife, “When a poor man comes to the door, be quick to give him food so that the same may be done to your children.” She exclaimed, “You are cursing our children [with the suggestion that they may become beggars].” But Rabbi Hiyya replied, “There is a wheel which revolves in this world.” —Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 151b
— Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Wisdom
And then I sez—‘How is anybody a-goin’ to live pattern lives, when they are a-starvin' to death? And how is anybody a-goin’ to enjoy religion when they are a-chokin’?
— Marietta Holley, Samantha at the World's Fair
Because of poverty and ignorance, not everyman living on earth lives in the same epoch!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
My mother often said, as long as a person is happy at work, then poverty is nothing to be ashamed of.
— Yu Hua
The essential difference between rich societies and poor societies does not stem from any greater effort the former devote to work, nor even from any greater technological knowledge the former hold. Instead it arises mainly from the fact that rich nations possess a more extensive network of capital goods wisely invested from an entrepreneurial standpoint. These goods consists of machines, tools, computers, buildings, semi-manufactured goods, software, etc., and they exist due to prior savings of the nation's citizens. In other words, comparatively rich societies possess more wealth because they have more time accumulated in the form of capital goods, which places them closer in time to the achievement of much more valuable goals.
— Jesús Huerta de Soto
Seeing myself or my church or my denomination as "the blessing" — like so many mission trips to help "those less fortunate than ourselves" — can easily descend into a blend of  benevolence and paternalism. We can start to see the "poor" as supporting characters in a big story about how noble, selfless, and helpful we are.
— Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People
One additional unit of income can do a hundred times as much to the benefit the extreme poor as it can to benefit you or I [earning the typical US wage of $28,000 or ‎£18,000 per year]. [I]t's not often you have two options, one of which is a hundred times better than the other. Imagine a happy hour where you could either buy yourself a beet for $5 or buy someone else a beer for 5¢. If that were the case, we'd probably be pretty generous – next round's on me! But that's effectively the situation we're in all the time. It's like a 99% off sale, or buy one, get ninety-nine free. It might be the most amazing deal you'll see in your life.
— William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
people who eat 3 meals a day throughout lifehave never reallytastedFood...
— Charles Bukowski
The church wanted us to give out food to malnourished children, but they didn't want us to question why they were malnourished to begin with.
— Elvia Alvarado, Don't Be Afraid, Gringo
How the prisoner and the immigrant are treated by the government, how the poor are treated and those without influence: this is secretly how the government would like to treat us all.
— Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea
If our family was poor, of what did our poverty consist? If our clothes were torn the torn places only let in the sun and wind. In the winter we had no overcoats, but that only meant that we ran rather than loitered. Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty.
— Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story
... the scriptures... when properly examined and rightly divided, do not portray Jesus as a poverty-stricken individual. On the contrary, Jesus is seen as a Man whose needs were met and who was regularly involved in meeting the needs of others.
— Kenneth E. Hagin
Poverty said the same thing, century after century, but in different kinds of sentences.
— Martin Amis
I believe in a world in which science is the key for supporting thedevelopment of a happy future for humanity. So, I advocate for such asituation in which scientists would speak louder. If science is silent, there is no way to solve high priority problems at a global level, such as: the gap between developed and undeveloped countries, poverty, limited energy resources, limited food and even drinking water (especially related to the population growth phenomenon), global warming and rapid climatechanges, etc.
— Eraldo Banovac
A thousand pounds for clothes--when on thinks how long poor people could live on it! When one thinks how long we could live on it, for that matter!
— Dodie Smith
The poor commit villainies because they are poor or because they have no alternative employment. But the rich do them in order to enjoy themselves more or to earn more money.
— මාර්ටින් වික්‍රමසිංහ, Yuganthaya
Sometimes when you had nothing at all and it was raining and you were alone in the flat, it was wonderful to know that you could have something even though it was only a cup of black and bitter coffee.
— Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
They [the church] wanted us to give food out to malnourished mothers and children, but they didn't want us to question why we were malnourished to begin with. They wanted us to grow vegetables on the tiny plots around our houses, but they didn't want us to question why we didn't have enough land to feed ourselves. [p. 16]
— Elvia Alvarado, Don't Be Afraid, Gringo
Should happiness and success be hidden, in view of the misery and poverty around. Would it be a sign of selfishness and un-intellectual behavior, if we admit to a pursuit of happiness? Could it, on the contrary, not work out as a motivation and an incentive? When giving voice to our happiness, could it not be perceived as a positive challenge? Could happiness not be contagious and become a salutary infectious syndrome? A beneficial infection. ( "Happy days are back again" )
— Erik Pevernagie
Millennials: We lost the genetic lottery. We graduated high school into terrorist attacks and wars. We graduated college into a recession and mounds of debt. We will never acquire the financial cushion, employment stability, and material possessions of our parents. We are often more educated, experienced, informed, and digitally fluent than prior generations, yet are constantly haunted by the trauma of coming of age during the detonation of the societal structure we were born into. But perhaps we are overlooking the silver lining. We will have less money to buy the material possessions that entrap us. We will have more compassion and empathy because our struggles have taught us that even the most privileged can fall from grace. We will have the courage to pursue our dreams because we have absolutely nothing to lose. We will experience the world through backpacking, couch surfing, and carrying on interesting conversations with adventurers in hostels because our bank accounts can't supply the Americanized resorts. Our hardships will obligate us to develop spiritual and intellectual substance. Maybe having roommates and buying our clothes at thrift stores isn't so horrible as long as we are making a point to pursue genuine happiness.
— Maggie Georgiana Young
Only education, self-respect and rational qualities will uplift the down-trodden.
— Periyar E.V. Ramasamy
She is drawn to the river, and all its hideous, dead-eyed treasures: rot-bloated cats, and cold-meat corpses of unwanted infants, eels plucking at their tender fingers and toes.
— Emmanuelle de Maupassant, The Gentlemen's Club
There are so many people in the world with so little. Who cares why you decide to help?
— Amy Poehler
By helping the poor, we must be able to remove their poverty. By extending help to one here and one there in the form of providing food will not remove poverty.
— Periyar E.V. Ramasamy
We have been living through a time of sorrow. Our seed remains seed. Our nostrils are dusty.
— Warren Eyster, The Goblins of Eros
If we agree that God did not create poverty then, in my opinion, it came in to being as a consequence of human rights violations.
— Q.M. Sidd
A fog of despair so pervaded the ghetto that the smallest gesture of rebellion could seem like a bold, piercing light. Bad, said with a fond expression, was almost always a compliment.
— Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
There were office-worn gents with yellow faces, bent backs, and one shoulder set slightly higher than the other from spending hours hunched over desks. And their sad, anxious faces spoke volumes about their domestic troubles, never-ending money worries, and all those old hopes which had been dashed for good; for they all belonged to the army of poor threadbare drudges who just about make ends meet in some dismal plasterboard house with a flowerbed for a garden in the rubbish-and-slag-heap belt on the outskirts of Paris.
— Guy de Maupassant, A Day in the Country and Other Stories
Girls barely budding open their legs to make a living, alongside the toothless and rancid of breath; hair thick with lice, they all find customers if the price is right, against the wall or on sheets well-soiled. Their holes cost but a shilling. Skins grow thick and claws sharp.
— Emmanuelle de Maupassant, The Gentlemen's Club
The day you forget about the poors, you become the poorest of the poor!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Someday men will learn to irrigate and spread fertilizer instead of praying for fertility.
— Warren Eyster, The Goblins of Eros
During times of need, it was always the people with the least to give who ended up sacrificing the most.
— Jacqueline Koyanagi, Ascension
It is a pervasive condition of empires that they affect great swathes of the planet without the empire's populace being aware of that impact - indeed without being aware that many of the affected places even exist. How many Americans are are of the continuing socioenvironmental fallout from U.S. militarism and foreign policy decisions made three or four decades ago in, say, Angola or Laos? How many could even place those nation-states on a map?
— Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
The cold is waiting to ooze through the soles of your shoes. Maggot-damp, this city is festering: home to hollow faces of grey flesh. They stare from windows unclean, into the sun never reaches: dismal lives lived in dismal constriction.
— Emmanuelle de Maupassant, The Gentlemen's Club
If we agree that God did not create poverty, then in my opinion, poverty came in to being as a consequence of human rights violations.
— Q.M. Sidd
The next day, when I came home from the library, there was a small, used red record player in my room. I found my mother in the kitchen and spotted a bandage taped to her arm. “Ma,” I asked. “Where did you get the money for the record player?” “I had it saved,” she lied. My father lived well, had a large house and an expensive imported car, wanted for little, and gave nothing. My mother lived on welfare in a slum and sold her blood to the Red Cross to get me a record player.  “Education is everything, Johnny,” she said, as she headed for the refrigerator to get me food. “You get smart like regular people and you don’t have to live like this no more.” She and I were not hugging types, but I put my hand on her shoulder as she washed the dishes with her back to me and she said, in best Brooklynese, “So go and enjoy, already.” My father always said I was my mother’s son and I was proud of that. On her good days, she was a good and noble thing to be a part of.  That evening, I plugged in the red record player and placed it by the window. My mother and I took the kitchen chairs out to the porch and listened to Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony from beginning to end, as we watched the oil-stained waters of the Mad River roll by. It was a good night, another good night, one of many that have blessed my life.
— John William Tuohy
The cruelty intrinsic to the workhouse system was excused by the need to discourage idleness, much as the malice intrinsic to the mental hospital system has been excused by the need to provide treatment.
— Thomas Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted
We live in the richest country in the world. There's plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want. And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle - the freedom, equality and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start? There are corporations worth billions of dollars- and hundreds of thousands of people who don't get to eat.
— Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
How can we embrace poverty as a way to God when everyone around us wants to become rich? Poverty has many forms. We have to ask ourselves: 'What is my poverty?' Is it lack of money, lack of emotional stability, lack of a loving partner, lack of security, lack of safety, lack of self-confidence? Each human being has a place of poverty. That’s the place where God wants to dwell! 'How blessed are the poor,' Jesus says (Matthew 5:3). This means that our blessing is hidden in our poverty.We are so inclined to cover up our poverty and ignore it that we often miss the opportunity to discover God, who dwells in it. Let’s dare to see our poverty as the land where our treasure is hidden.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen, Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith
Social justice has to do with issues such as poverty, inequality, war, racism, sexism, abortion, and lack of concern for ecology because what lies at the root at each of these is not so much someone's private sin but rather a huge, blind system that is inherently unfair.
— Ronald Rolheiser
For the first time in my life, I was eating well and from plates—glass plates, no less, not out of the frying pan because somebody lost all the plates in the last move. Now when we ate, we sat at a fine round oak table in sturdy chairs that matched. No one rushed through the meal or argued over who got the biggest portion, and we ate three times a day.
— John William Tuohy, No Time to Say Goodbye: A Memoir of a Life in Foster Care
Charity is appeased when some rich person gives money to the poor while justice asks why one person can be that rich when so many are poor.
— Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality
These poor people have learned to endure day to day economic agony. It’s routine in daily life for them. They are so accustomed to facing economic pain that poverty doesn’t hurt them anymore. Extreme negativity in their life drove learning endurance and their accomplishment to endure extreme conditions is ‘positivity’ they mastered
— Sadashivan Nair, Negative-Positive and We
The absence of knowledge of the truths about money leads to poverty and financial slavery.
— Sunday Adelaja
A lack of giving in the life of a person will bring him to poverty.
— Sunday Adelaja
Jesus,” I prayed silently, “please fix it so that my turn to read won’t come around.” And then the nun called my name, but before I stood I thought, “I’ll bet you think this is funny, huh, Jesus?”  I stood and stared at the sentence assigned to me and believed that, through some miracle, I would suddenly be able to read it and not be humiliated. I stood there and stared at it until the children started giggling and snickering and Sister told me to sit down.
— John William Tuohy
Denny thought our parents needed a combination of material goods and temperamental changes before he could return home. “If Dad buys Ma a car, then she’ll love him, and they’ll get back together and she won’t be all crazy anymore,” he said. For years he held out the possibility that those things would happen and all would change. “If we had more things, like stoves and cars,” he told me at night in our bedroom, “and Ma wasn’t like she is, we could go home.
— John William Tuohy, No Time to Say Goodbye: A Memoir of a Life in Foster Care
It takes nothing to stay in poverty, but everything to break free from it.
— Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All Africans: How Every African Can Live the Life of Their Dreams
A writer can live by his writing. If not so luxuriously as by other trades, then less luxuriously. The nature of the work he does all day will more affect his happiness than the quality of his dinner at night. Whatever be your calling, and however much it brings you in the year, you could still, you know, get more by cheating. We all suffer ourselves to be too much concerned about a little poverty; but such considerations should not move us in the choice of that which is to be the business and justification of so great a portion of our lives; and like the missionary, the patriot, or the philosopher, we should all choose that poor and brave career in which we can do the most and best for mankind.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
I see a role for specialized knowledge, but I think that it's important for there to be an arena where it is shared, where it is communicated. It's not that somebody shouldn't have specialized knowledge. The ability to dig a trench and lay a cable is a kind of specialized knowledge. Farmers have specialized knowledge, too. The question is: what sort of knowledge is privileged in our societies? I don't think that a CEO is more valuable to society and ought to be paid ten million dollars a year, while farmers and laborers starve.The range of what is valued has become so extreme that one lot of people have captured it and left three-quarters of the world to live in unthinkable poverty, because their work is not valued. What would happen if the sweepers of the city went on strike or the sewage system didn't work? A CEO wouldn't be able to deal with his own shit.
— Arundhati Roy, The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy
There is little to be said in favour of poverty, but it was often an incubator of true friendship. Many people will appear to befriend you when you are wealthy, but precious few will do the same when you are poor
— Nelson Mandela
I am here because I worked too hard and too long not to be here. But although I told the university that I would walk across the stage to take my diploma, I won’t. At age fifty-seven, I’m too damned old, and I’d look ridiculous in this crowd. From where I’m standing in the back of the hall, I can see that I am at least two decades older than most of the parents of these kids in their black caps and gowns. So I’ll graduate with this class, but I won’t walk across the stage and collect my diploma with them; I’ll have the school send it to my house. I only want to hear my name called. I’ll imagine what the rest would have been like. When you’ve had a life like mine, you learn to do that, to imagine the good things. The ceremony is about to begin. It’s a warm June day and a hallway of glass doors leading to the parking lot are open, the dignitaries march onto the stage, a janitor slams the doors shut, one after the other.  That banging sound.  It’s Christmas Day 1961 and three Waterbury cops are throwing their bulk against our sorely overmatched front door. They are wearing their long woolen blue coats and white gloves and they swear at the cold.  They’ve finally come for us, in the dead of night, to take us away, just as our mother said they would.
— John William Tuohy, No Time to Say Goodbye: A Memoir of a Life in Foster Care.
Poverty and sickness have this miraculous power of completely changing one’s priorities
—  one’s sentimental and psychological values go out the window.
At least ten times as many people died from preventable, poverty-related diseases on September 11, 2011, as died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that black day. The terrorist attacks led to trillions of dollars being spent on the ‘war on terrorism’ and on security measures that have inconvenienced every air traveller since then. The deaths caused by poverty were ignored. So whereas very few people have died from terrorism since September 11, 2001, approximately 30,000 people died from poverty-related causes on September 12, 2001, and on every day between then and now, and will die tomorrow. Even when we consider larger events like the Asian tsunami of 2004, which killed approximately 230,000 people, or the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed up to 200,000, we are still talking about numbers that represent just one week’s toll for preventable, poverty-related deaths — and that happens fifty-two weeks in every year.
— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics
To be unable to read was the ultimate measure of wretchedness.
— David McCullough, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris
Notwithstanding the memories of slavery, and in the face poverty, ignorance, terrorism, and subjugation still deeply woven into their lives, the embittered past of blacks was taken onto a much higher plane of intellectual and artistic consideration during the Renaissance.
— Clement Alexander Price, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Life’s mystery continued to trouble meA question came to my mind, is freedom dearer than life? or does it become easier to live when life becomes difficult?
— Suman Pokhrel
The poor stay poor here because they do not save enough.
— Abhijit V. Banerjee, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
Let's think of that moment when a woman washed the feet of Jesus with the nard, so expensive: it is a religious moment, a moment of gratitude, a moment of love. And he [Judas] stands apart with bitter criticism: 'But this could have been used for the poor!' This is the first reference that I have found, in the Gospel, to poverty as an ideology. The ideologue does not know what love is, because he does nt know how to give himself.
— Pope Francis, Encountering Truth: Meeting God in the Everyday
Looking back, I wish that everyone could have that sort of moment: a moment where you realize that your hands are so impossibly small and this world is so impossibly big. And the two don’t seem to add up. Maybe recognizing the smallness of your own hands is just the very first step to changing anything at all.
— Hannah Brencher, If You Find This Letter: My Journey to Find Purpose Through Hundreds of Letters to Strangers
There are many forms of poverty: economic poverty, physical poverty, emotional poverty, mental poverty, and spiritual poverty. As long as we relate primarily to each other's wealth, health, stability, intelligence, and soul strength, we cannot develop true community. Community is not a talent show in which we dazzle the world with our combined gifts. Community is the place where our poverty is acknowledged and accepted, not as something we have to learn to cope with as best as we can but as a true source of new life.Living community in whatever form - family, parish, twelve-step program, or intentional community - challenges us to come together at the place of our poverty, believing that there we can reveal our richness.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen, Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith
I didn't have a drill, so I had to make my own. First I heated a long nail in the fire, then drove it through a half a maize cob, creating a handle. I placed the nail back on the coals until it became red hot, then used it to bore holes into both sets of plastic blades.
— William Kamkwamba, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope
Ambition and poverty are powerful motivators...
— Jennifer Donnelly, The Winter Rose
Poverty advances discrimination and corruption because society classifies the rich and poor. Poverty augments anger, selfishness, hatred and envy among the people.Poverty entwined with desperation ends up in violence." - Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from If I Could Tell You
— Angelica Hopes
With the money my mother earned from selling cakes, my father cut a deal with Mangochi and bought one pail of maize. My mother took it to the mill, saved half the flour for us, and used the rest for more cakes. We did this every day, taking enough to eat and selling the rest. It was enough to provide our one blob of nsima each night, along with some pumpkin leaves. It was practically nothing, yet knowing it would be there somehow made the hunger less painful. "As long as we can stay in business," my father said, "we'll make it through. Our profit is that we live.
— William Kamkwamba, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope
I ate so many Ramen noodles that I wouldn't even touch a package of them now.
— Jeremy Camp, I Still Believe
Lopez made sandals out of one tire. He sold them at ten cents each, because people sometimes needed only one.
— Warren Eyster, The Goblins of Eros
News came of Beni Beni, the madman of Wimbe, who'd always made us laugh in better times. He'd run up to merchants in the trading center with his raving eyes and snatch cakes and Fantas from their stalls. No one ever took them away because his hands were always so filthy. The mad people had always depended on others to care for them, but now there were none. Beni Beni died at the church.
— William Kamkwamba, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope
Poverty in western Mexico is an Unconditional Sentence.
— Warren Eyster, The Goblins of Eros
Papa, why are you selling our goats? I like these goats.""A week ago the price was five hundred, now it's four hundred. I'm sorry, but we can't wait for it go any lower."Mankhalala and the others were tied by their front legs with a long rope. When my father started down the trail, they stumbled and began to cry. They knew their future. Mankhalala looked back, as if telling me to help him. Even Khamba whined and barked a few times, pleading their case. But I had to let them down. What could I do? My family had to eat.
— William Kamkwamba, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope
Most families around town only had a bottle of aspirin in their medicine cabinets. If you had the flu, you took an aspirin. If you had a toothache, you took an aspirin. If you were bitten by a snake, you took an aspirin. If you developed kidney problems from taking too much aspirin, you took an aspirin. You wouldn't even think of going to the emergency room unless your leg was hanging by a thread. And even then you might wait a while.
— Marlin Bressi, Blow Me: Hairy Adventures in the Salon Industry
Books appear to be frail and disposable, but they are sacred. You can burn the paper, but the stories live on. In the same way, a poor man or woman is not a burden on society, they are those who survive despite the odds—and when they don’t, they still represent those who tried.
— Mohammad Zayer
Most of [the alchemists] were poor; many all but unknown in their own time, many died and saw no fruit of their labours… Of some the very names are forgotten. But though their names be dead, their works live, and grow and spread over ever fresh generations of youth, showing them fresh steps towards that temple of wisdom which is the knowledge of things as they are.
— Kingsley
They are les misérables - the outcasts, the underdogs. And who is to blame? Is it not the most fallen who have most need of charity?
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Every one of us see many nightmares every day, not in our sleeps but with our very own eyes: The poverty! The most real and the most common nightmare of all times!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Is everything forbidden us except to fold our arms? Poverty is not written in the stars
—  under development is not one of God's mysterious designs.
I realized that poverty was a kind of captivity.
— Nancy E. Turner
WE MUST ALL EAT OR ELSE WE WILL PUT SAND IN YOUR FOOD.
— Job Amupanda
If we adopt the same collaborative mindset and practices that got to the moon and back, and that built the International Space Station, we can alleviate poverty—and do much more.
— Ron Garan, The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture from a Journey of 71 Million Miles
If poverty is the mother of all crimes, lack of intelligence is their father.
— Jean de La Bruyère
The Americans of the United States do not let their dogs hunt the Indians as do the Spaniards in Mexico, but at bottom it is the same pitiless feeling which here, as everywhere else, animates the European race. This world here belongs to us, they tell themselves every day: the Indian race is destined for final destruction which one cannot prevent and which it is not desirable to delay. Heaven has not made them to become civilized; it is necessary that they die. Besides I do not want to get mixed up in it. I will not do anything against them: I will limit myself to providing everything that will hasten their ruin. In time I will have their lands and will be innocent of their death. Satisfied with his reasoning, the American goes to church where he hears the minister of the gospel repeat every day that all men are brothers, and that the Eternal Being who has made them all in like image, has given them all the duty to help one another.
— Alexis de Tocqueville
To be blessed and yet permit gluttony to blind me to the blessings is to banish myself to a life of unrelenting poverty even though I might be utterly engulfed in the embrace of a million marvelous blessings.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
A poor man in this world can be done to death in two main ways, by the absolute indifference of his fellows in peacetime or by their homicidal mania when there's a war.
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Amidst the crowd, tumbling like a stone, although lying on the roads, I’m but a life.
— Waheed Ibne Musa, Johnny Fracture
When the rich and the powerful rise they leave the powerless and the poor without possibility.
— Auliq Ice
Facing poverty is better than living in poverty and by facing poverty you can overcome it at one point.
— Auliq Ice
When they think about Africa, they think about War, Poverty, Hunger and Diseases.
— Unotjari Festus Kavari
It's sad to see the world live in ignorance full of pain only enjoyed luxuriously by the few stupid greedy ones.
— Auliq Ice
Lack of luxury is not a reason to push others to poverty. ~ Michael A. van Doorn, Odyssey of a Heart, Home of a Soul
— Angelica Hopes
The world is full of grief and no peace but every body has a different way of ending it.
— Auliq Ice
Everyone is poor in one way or another, so there is no need to worry of where you belong, we are all rich and poor at the same time.
— Auliq Ice
Poverty is the events of forced separation of mass from the nature. Poverty is not the cause but the outcome. Poverty is not natural, it is created, it is abnormal, unexpected and unwanted. Its was never part of the nature and never will be. Poverty has been engineered by few Unwise, irresponsible and selfish individuals.
— William Gomes
Nothing awakens the conscience like a lot of money.
— P. Sainath
The fastest and cheapest way to eradicate poverty is not by giving food but by giving hope, love, and education.
— Debasish Mridha
Poverty becomes a marvellously beautiful thing when the mindis free of society. One must become poor inwardly for then there isno seeking, no asking, no desire, no - nothing! It is only this inwardpoverty that can see the truth of a life in which there is no conflict at all
— Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known
Africa! Africa! Africa! Africa my motherland!Africa, your people cries for you!Africans must educate their citizens.Africans must reach out to it's people and empower them to build the nation.Africans you are the only people who can liberated your citizens from poverty through education. Africans must pay the price to rebuild the continent.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Dr. Kim couldn't remember the last time she'd seen a bowl of pure white rice. What was a bowl of rice doing there, just sitting out on the ground? She figured it out just before she heard the dog's bark.Up until that moment, a part of her had hoped that China would be just as poor as North Korea. She still wanted to believe that her country was the best place in the world. The beliefs she had cherished for a lifetime would be vindicated. But now she couldn't deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.
— Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
Make a commitment to serve the needs of the ‘least of these’ and give voice to the voiceless.
— Artika Tyner
Whenever governments wanted to achieve some end, often involving population growth, they restricted access to birth control and/or criminalized birth control unless, of course, the population growth concerned the poor, in which case, contraception was enthusiastically promoted. Historically, society has only wanted the "right kind of people" to have a right to life. We shouldn't forget that fact.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
There’s no snobbery like that of the poor toward one another.
— Dorothy Salisbury Davis
They don't deal with any basic difference in human nature between black and white..., they only study the effects of environment on human nature. You place the white man in the ghetto, deprive him of educational advantages, arrange it so he has to struggle hard to fulfill his instinct for self-respect, give him little physical privacy and leisure time, and he would after a time assume the same characteristics you attach to the Negro. These characteristics don't spring from whiteness or blackness, but from a man's conditioning.
— John Howard Griffin
Anyway, they went and built this silly housing project, with us living right across the street from it. Some of the children from the housing project got into trouble. You can't just take people who don't have anything, don't know what they're doing, pack them in a bunch of buildings, and expect it's going to all work out somehow.- Sadie
— Amy Hill Hearth, Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years
It’s amazing how just dressing differently can affect your influence; dress like a beggar and your assumed poverty gains you looks of contempt; dress in gold-lined robes and people are more willing to accommodate you; sport armour and you look strong, dutiful, and prepared.
— A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar
In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology:This is rather extraordinary. Orwell did indeed meet Garrett in Liverpool in 1936, and was highly impressed to find that he knew him already through his pseudonymous writing—under the name Matt Lowe—for John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi. As he told his diary:Thus the evidence that supposedly shames Orwell by contrast is in fact supplied by—none other than Orwell himself! This is only slightly better than the other habit of his foes, which is to attack him for things he quotes other people as saying, as if he had instead said them himself. (The idea that a writer must be able to ‘afford’ to write is somewhat different and, as an idea, is somewhat—to use a vogue term of the New Left—‘problematic’. If it were only the bourgeois who were able to write, much work would never have been penned and, incidentally, Orwell would never have met Garrett in the first place.)
— Christopher Hitchens
Success is relative. We shouldn't compare the financial success between a person born into riches and the one born into abject poverty.
— Assegid Habtewold, The 9 Cardinal Building Blocks: For Continued Success in Leadership
When an officer finds themselves arresting pastors that are feeding people who have nothing, they should know they’re on the wrong side.
— Justin King
Some ancient oversight had nearly taken his sight, but this sad fuck was already blind inside.
— Carla H. Krueger, The Social Worker
It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who earned good money and kept it, as some kind of shameful miracle. White people liked that idea because Negroes with money and sense made them nervous. Colored people liked it because, in those days, they trusted poverty, believed it was a virtue and a sure sign of honesty. Too much money had a whiff of evil and somebody else's blood.
— Toni Morrison
There are three ways YOU can GET OUT of abject poverty. The first is inheritance which is always volatile and very scarce. The second is Education which very sustainable. The third and the most EFFECTIVE way is DEATH (or to Die ). But I recommend YOU to Choose Education
— Oppong Amankwaa
The great principle of out-of-door relief is, to give the paupers exactly what they don't want; and then they get tired of coming.
— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
When the statistics have a face, poverty becomes personal.
— Marquita Burke-DeJesus, Radically Ordinary
While many of us give to the hungry orphan, we have forgotten to love her.
— Marquita Burke-DeJesus, Radically Ordinary
The greatest sorrow in the life of a peasant is that his donkey is lost. And the greatest happiness is that he finds it back.
— Khalid Farooq
An investment in your country’s education pays the best interest.
— Ishvind Kumar Caleechurn
The best way to detect the destructive element in someone is to watch closely their behavioural pattern when given authority over poverty.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
One would never defeat one's circumstances by working and saving one's pennies; one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies, and, besides, the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear. It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else—housewives, taxi-drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges, doctors, and grocers—would never, by the operation of any generous human feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities.
— James     Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
The people who say poverty is no excuse for low performance are now using teacher accountability as an excuse for doing nothing about poverty.
— David Berliner
Each new mornNew widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrowsStrike heaven on the face, that it resoundsAs if it felt with Scotland, and yelled outLike syllable of dolor.
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
There are so many problems to solve on this planet first before we begin to trash other worlds.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
Simplicity enables us to live lives of integrity in the face of the terrible realities of our global village.
— Richard J. Foster, Freedom of Simplicity: Finding Harmony in a Complex World
At the end of the school day, we walked the long, cold way home feeling happy and hungry. There we found a warm fire, country ham with gravy and hot biscuits, and a mother to hug us! If snow blew under the doors that night, what did it matter? Christmas time was just around the corner.
— Jenny Lee Ellison, Sand Knob through the Eyes of a Child
We have to make these young people (of the Depression) feel that they are necessary. (They should be given) "certain things for which youth craves – the chance for self-sacrifice for an ideal.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
As for my own answers to any of this? I have none. I'm far more confused than before I first went. I've had no great epiphanies, no profound realisations, but since returning home I've resigned myself to this one thing: that, putting the economics and politics of it all aside - naive as that may be - what it all boils down to is individuals. It's a simple interaction between just two people: one, a person with opportunities and choices, and who could get a flight out tomorrow should they choose; the other, a person with few options - if any. If nothing else, it's a gesture. An attempt. Food and a tent for Toto. Burns dressing for Jose. A little operating theatre with car batteries and boiled instruments, where Roberto can ply his trade. Free HIV treatment for Elizabeth, who'll never be cured and will always live in a hut anyway, but who'll have a longer, healthier life because of it. And sometimes it's little more than a bed in which to die peacefully, attended to by family and health workers... but hey, that's no small thing in some parts. My head says it's futile. My heart knows differently.
— Damien Brown, Band-Aid for a Broken Leg
We won't let poverty kill educational access & opportunities. We'll kill poverty through education.
— Sharad Vivek Sagar
Among this people there is no leisure class. We often forget that in the United States over half the youth and adults are not in the world earning incomes, but are making homes, learning of the world, or resting after the heat of the strife. But here ninety-six per cent are toiling; no one with leisure to turn the bare and cheerless cabin into a home, no old folks to sit beside the fire and hand down traditions of the past; little of careless happy childhood and dreaming youth.
— W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk