Iain Duncan Smith Quotes

We have broken the cycle of dependency. People have found out they're better off working.

Through Gateway to Work, we can provide more of the workers our businesses need to thrive, and we can help give more of our families the opportunity to work their way to self-sufficiency and into the middle class.

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion about the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.

It's a powerful thing to know that you are empowering someone to lift themselves out of poverty.

Helping people boost themselves out of poverty is the best way to make a lasting positive difference in a person's life.

Education is the antidote to poverty.

It was really important for me to understand that I needed to provide for myself, and I needed to become a provider for my own family, too.

Compassion, however, should mean providing a mechanism to escape poverty rather than simply maintaining people in an impoverished state by supplying handouts. By doing this we give them an opportunity to elevate their personal situations, which eventually decreases our need to take care of them and empowers them to be able to exercise compassion toward others.

I never was a person who wanted a handout. I was a cafeteria worker. I'm not too proud to ask the Best Western manager to give me a job. I have cleaned homes.

I left Israel to work as a model, to just make money - I didn't care if I was doing an ad for toilet paper or diapers, I just really wanted to allow myself to go to school, to go to university without waitressing, because when I'm in a school environment I just really like to study and have the best grades and learn as much as I can.

Statistically after six months, if an Indigenous or non-Indigenous person has come off welfare, even long-term welfare, and has stuck in that's job for six months, then they've really broken in their own psychology the welfare reliance mentality. They're up on their own two feet.

I wouldn't have the life I have without television. I wouldn't be looking out my apartment window onto the East River; I wouldn't be able to afford to have my mother with me this summer. So television has been very good to me.

Education can lift individuals out of poverty and into rewarding careers.

Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody.

Our growing, robust economy is able to provide the average American citizen access to the best social program there is - a steady job.

I never wanted to rely on my family for money.

Every thoughtful and kind-hearted person must regard with interest any device or plan which promises to enable at least the more intelligent, enterprising, and determined part of those who are not capitalists to cease to labor for hire.

Social-enterprise employees earn wages and pay taxes, reducing their recidivism rates and dependence on government assistance. They also receive crucial on-the-job training, job-readiness skills, literacy instruction and, if necessary, the counseling and mental-health services they need to move into the mainstream workforce.

I'm hoping that the administration and other thought leaders will succeed eventually in bringing the country back to the older idea that the American dream is having a career, getting a job, and getting involved in it, and doing well. That was the core of the good life.

It was a question of helping a man prepare in the way that suits him best. The theory is if you give a man responsibility for his own actions, then it is up to him to accept that responsibility.

In my youth, I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

We should measure welfare's success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added.

The best way poor people can come out of their poverty is to get on the global highway, not on some dirt side road.

To me, that's the role of government: not to give people a hand out, but a hand up... giving people the tools to pave their own way to success.

It changed my life in a lot of ways - before I got that role I was just going from job to job, not really having enough money to be able to do what I wanted to do.