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Quotes tagged “Poverty”

“The government should resolve poverty. Drug pushers will not sell drugs if they can feed their family.”
— Anonymous, Poverty, not drugs afflict children more
Tagged: Drug War, Philippines, Poverty, Third World
“When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatise those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.”
— Sarah Kendzior, A government shutdown, a social breakdown
Tagged: Poverty, Wealth Inequality, Capitalism, Wealth
“What’s really misleading about neoliberal analysis of globalized capitalism is the idea everything works out because conditions for many are gradually improving. For any criticism you have of exploitation and imperialism, they have a chart showing gradual improvement in some communities.

Without more knowledge about the situation, you’d be inclined to agree. What’s wrong with capitalism if, over time, X amount of people left poverty?

That’s the argument for globalized capitalism.

The problem is, such a response is misleading. There is no taking into account how many people around the world remain in poverty (over a billion), how many deaths can be prevented.

Another problem is that it implies such conditions (extreme poverty, exploitation) are necessary in modern society. They are, of course, not.

Nike isn’t forced to use sweatshops instead of fairly paying workers and keeping them in safe conditions, they are driven to do it by the profit motive. The fact that such enormous wealth exists and neglects to ‘trickle down’ to people working constantly is an obvious problem.

So in the end the argument for globalized capitalism is misleading–not because the facts presented are incorrect, but because these desperate living conditions, in the modern world, are not necessary in the first place. Why would the corporation pay so little and allow disasters to happen in the workplace? Profit.

Instead of further questioning the system, we stop at a single graph.”
— comcastkills
Tagged: Capitalism, Money, Greed, Globalization, Imperialism, Poverty, Fashion Industry
“We shout "self care" and "joy" all day but won't admit we have a "poor people not apply" footnote to things we have deemed to be for "us." The middle class, the bougie elite. The ones who don’t even realize they’re just as poor.

Poor people buy Jordans? We're upset.
Poor people have cable? We're angry.
Poor people make minimum wage? We think it's too much money if we don't make more.”
— Preston D. Mitchum
Tagged: Poverty, Poor People, classism, Envy, Important
“Maybe one day we'll be able to admit that we hate poor people and don't want them to have nice things.”
— Preston D. Mitchum
Tagged: Poverty, Poor People, classism
“I only made $200 a week and I had to buy my own bullets.”
— Jackie Gleason, JACKIE GLEASON DIES OF CANCER; COMEDIAN AND ACTOR WAS 71
Tagged: Poverty
“I'm for the poor man — all poor men, black and white, they all gotta have a chance. They gotta have a home, a job, and a decent education for their children. 'Every man a king' — that's my slogan.”
— Huey Long
Tagged: poor, Poverty, Advocacy, Chance
“...in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself.”
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses
Tagged: Slavery, Wealth, Equality, Poverty
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
— James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
Tagged: Poverty, classism
“Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country and giving it to the rich people of a poor country.”
— Ron Paul, Ron Paul’s Speech at CPAC 2011: The Brushfires of Freedom Are Burning!
Tagged: Foreign Aid, Wealth, Poverty
“There are people in our society who should be separated and discarded. I think it’s one of the tendencies of the liberal community to feel that every person in a nation of over 200 million people can be made into a productive citizen.”
— Spiro Agnew
Tagged: Poverty, Welfare, Liberals
“It's simply a national acknowledgement that in any kind of priority, the needs of human beings must come first. Poverty is here and now. Hunger is here and now. Racial tension is here and now. Pollution is here and now. These are the things that scream for a response. And if we don't listen to that scream—and if we don't respond to it—we may well wind up sitting amidst our own rubble, looking for the truck that hit us—or the bomb that pulverized us. Get the license number of whatever it was that destroyed the dream. And I think we will find that the vehicle was registered in our own name.”
— Rod Serling
Tagged: Poverty, Pollution, Hunger, Racial Tension
“Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache.”
— Mae West, A quote by Mae West
Tagged: Love, Poverty
“It's no accident that the Irish invented stream-of-consciousness literature. It was of absolute necessity. Poverty and the deprivation of their own language made this very important. Hence long-term memory, which is a Celtic thing.”
— John Lydon, Sex Pistol John Lydon is 'Rotten' again
Tagged: Poverty, Literature, Stream of Consciousness, Language, Celtic
“*parasitic capitalists jack up the prices of essentials in the aftermath of a disaster*

Media: unfortunate but what are you gonna do

*people steal those overpriced essentials because they cannot afford to pay the extortionate prices being asked*

Media: what the fuck do these criminals think they’re doing”
— electoralcollege
Tagged: Capitalism, Media, Poverty, classism, Institutional Racism, Tumblr Jokes
“Mankind’s greatest error, the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity.”
— Orhan Pamuk, Snow
Tagged: Poverty, Deception, stupidity
“If we only look away, it's hard to listen, and it is through listening that we can learn how to actually help, rather than just imposing upon others OUR ideas for what they need.”
— John Green, Looking Away
Tagged: Poverty, Helping Others
“I understand this urge to look away; but I think to change the world, we must grapple with it as we find it. I wanna live in a world where children don't die of diarrhea and malaria, where they aren't malnourished, where they can drink clean water. And the world I want to live in won't come about by me looking away.”
— John Green, Looking Away
Tagged: Poverty, Marginalized, Systemic Injustice
“The poor are voiceless in too much of our contemporary discourse.”
— John Green, Looking Away
Tagged: Poverty, Marginalized, Systemic Injustice
“Not all poverty is equal and not all people living in poverty are identical.”
— John Green, Our Old Friend Complexity: Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Tagged: Societal Construction, Social Awareness, Poverty

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This page was created by our editorial team. Each page is manually curated, researched, collected, and issued by our staff writers. Quotes contained on this page have been double checked for their citations, their accuracy and the impact it will have on our readers.

Kelly Peacock is an accomplished poet and social media expert based in Brooklyn, New York. Kelly has a Bachelor's degree in creative writing from Farieligh Dickinson University and has contributed to many literary and cultural publications. Kelly assists on a wide variety of quote inputting and social media functions for Quote Catalog. Visit her personal website here.

Kendra Syrdal is a writer, editor, partner, and senior publisher for The Thought & Expression Company. Over the last few years she has been personally responsible for writing, editing, and producing over 30+ million pageviews on Thought Catalog.