Peter Yarrow Quotes

The association of poverty with progress is the enigma of our times.

Those who know the normal life of the poor... will realize well enough that without economic security, liberty is not worth having.

We can't have it so there are skyscrapers side by side with slums.

As an anthropology major, I wanted to understand the cultural significance of poverty - why it exists and why some countries can rise above it while others can't.

There is a lot of inequality in Colombia. We have to correct that.

Labour ministers often look puzzled when reports show that Britain has one of the lowest levels of social mobility in the developed world. They just don't get it. They see poverty, inequality, fairness, as all about income. For the past 12 years, they have relied on tax credits to solve this. But tax credits do not solve poverty: they mask it.

Once any group in society stands in a relatively deprived position in relation to other groups, it is genuinely deprived.

70% of children born into poverty will never make it to the middle class. The uncomfortable truth is that there are now a number of other countries with as much or more opportunity than ours. In fact, more people in Canada go on to surpass the income of their parents than in the United States.

It's shocking to me still, that children - just because of where they're born - are born into a life of extreme poverty and hunger. Humans, we can survive without a lot of luxuries we are lucky to live with. But the thing we need most is healthy food and clean water. Without that we can't survive and we can't thrive.

You have to be interested in inequality. The issue of inequality and that of poverty are not separable.

The poor are the human manure in which grow the harvests of life, the harvests of joy which the rich reap.

We adults, our policies, our ways of governance, are responsible for poverty, not the children.

Instead of war on poverty, they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.

Poverty does not create our social problems...our social problems create our poverty.

The poor are the only ones who suffer. And they're used to it.

When I find too many puzzles about the way explanations are given about why there is inequality - why people who work the hardest in the world end up being the poorest - I can't just sit back and not try to understand why the gaps between people are increasing, or why there are so many homeless and hungry people in the world.

In the US a child born into a poor family will become a poor adult. The american dream is just that - it is not true, because of the level of extreme inequality.

You can't start taking away benefits if people don't have any opportunities.

Disparity is Australia's worst social problem. Thousands of lives are slowly being crushed, while billions are wasted on thousands of little initiatives trying to 'close the gap.'

The endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society.

After the revolution, let us hope, prisons simply would not exist - if by prisons we mean places that could be experienced by the men and women in them at all as every place that goes by that name now is bound to be experienced.

But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case.

Bolivia is not yet a country of equals.

There's prejudice and poverty in Hungary as there is in every country.