You meet folks who are funny and really smart and persistent and loving that are confronting this thing we call poverty, which is just a shorthand for this way of life that holds you underwater. And you just wonder what our country would be if we allowed these people to flourish and reach their full potential.
The poor man wishes to conceal his poverty, and the rich man his wealth: the former fears lest he be despised, the latter lest he be plundered.
Poverty is a very complicated issue, but feeding a child isn't.
As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
People who work full-time in America should not have to live in poverty - simple as that. Too many jobs don't pay enough to get by, let alone get ahead. Too many people are finding the rungs on the ladder of opportunity further and further apart.
Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.
In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.
Poverty should not be viewed by us as a humiliation and even less so as a position of honour or a fatality.
Poverty is not inevitable. It is a human ill that we can fight if we decide to do so together.
I can't eradicate poverty, but at least for the people around me, I can help make sure no child is denied a dream.
People who are denied access to power are also denied the opportunity to make or influence decisions to live a better life out of poverty and claim their rights.
Poverty was an ornament on a learned man like a red ribbon on a white horse.
The problem is neutrality ends in poverty, neutrality ends in choices that hurt people's lives. This administration is deliberately telling organizations that are there to help young girls make good choices, not to tell them what the good choice is. That is absolutely unconscionable.
Wealthy men can't live in an island that is encircled by poverty. We all breathe the same air. We must give a chance to everyone, at least a basic chance.
We need to see the FLSA and the minimum wage as part of a larger struggle to cut poverty and to address the challenge of income inequality.
I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty.
Look at any country that's plagued with poverty, disease or violence; the antidote is girls. Girls are the antibodies to many of society's ills.
Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.
The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty - and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction.
When I think how art education is eliminated whenever we get a budget crunch in the schools, I have to stand up and say that even when there was dire poverty ten blocks away from Tiffany Studios in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, there was art and creativity within.
Clothes make the poor invisible. America has the best-dressed poverty the world has ever known.
Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.
When you see in places like Africa and parts of Asia abject poverty, hungry children and malnutrition around you, and you look at yourself as being people who have well being and comforts, I think it takes a very insensitive, tough person not to feel they need to do something.
With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin.
To expose the hardships experienced by children who are deprived of the right to attend school, Camfed has produced a series of films about educational exclusion. 'Every Child Belongs in School' provides a glimpse into the lives of children who have been forced by poverty to leave school at a very young age and take a difficult life path.
Poverty makes you wise but it's a curse.
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
Americans are blessed with great plenty; we are a generous people and we have a moral obligation to assist those who are suffering from poverty, disease, war and famine.
An alcoholic father, poverty, my own juvenile diabetes, the limited English my parents spoke - although my mother has become completely bilingual since. All these things intrude on what most people think of as happiness.
Poverty existed before January 20, 2008, OK? Before President Obama took office.
What matters poverty? What matters anything to him who is enamoured of our art? Does he not carry in himself every joy and every beauty?
We must create economic opportunity, build a culture of entrepreneurship, get people to take responsibility for improving their lives, rather than putting them in a position where they sit back in their poverty and blame others for it.
The prevalence of mobile homes does not correspond with the prevalence of poverty, or with much of anything else. All that can be confidently said about America's mobile homes is that they are massed in places where you wouldn't want to be in one. Florida's mobile homes lie athwart the path of hurricanes. Georgia's are in the way of tornadoes.
This nation has always struggled with how it was going to deal with poor people and people of color. Every few years you will see some great change in the way that they approach this. We've had the war on poverty that never really got into waging a real war on poverty.
To say that any people are not fit for freedom, is to make poverty their choice, and to say they had rather be loaded with taxes than not.
We have to stand together against terror and the reasons for terrorism, which are poverty and ignorance.
