Megan McArdle Quotes

I think we've learned that the S.B.A. plays a critical role in providing access and opportunity when the market is not providing that access. We help banks get that money out into the hands of important and viable businesses, particularly those owned by minorities, women, immigrants and veterans.

I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over.

It is a campaign to break down every barrier that holds you back. We need more than a plan for the big banks. The middle class needs a raise. And we need more jobs.

The poor need jobs and money, not psychoanalysis. The uneducated need knowledge and skills, not psychoanalysis.

Our idea is to serve everybody, including people with little money.

I wanted to give money to people like this woman so that they would be free from the moneylenders to sell their product at the price which the markets gave them - which was much higher than what the trader was giving them.

Unemployment payments are now made for 99 weeks. That is the time it takes to get an Associate’s Degree. Establish the principle that we do not give money away for doing nothing.

Providing jobs at three flat factories in Malawi to make school desks for kids who have never seen desks, and providing scholarships for girls to go to high school who would never otherwise be able to go to high school, is by far the most important work I do.

The key to ending extreme poverty is to enable the poorest of the poor to get their foot on the ladder of development. The ladder of development hovers overhead, and the poorest of the poor are stuck beneath it. They lack the minimum amount of capital necessary to get a foothold, and therefore need a boost up to the first rung.

When you get a mobile phone it is almost like having a card to get you out of poverty in a couple of years.

Disabled people need more invested in their education, housing, job training, transportation, assistive technology, and independent-living facilities. Governments earn back this investment - and more - by making people with disabilities economically productive citizens.

An important lever for sustained action in tackling poverty and reducing hunger is money.

President Obama is the most successful food stamp president in American history. I would like to be the most successful paycheck president in American history.

There are 4 billion cell phones in use today. Many of them are in the hands of market vendors, rickshaw drivers, and others who've historically lacked access to education and opportunity. Information networks have become a great leveler, and we should use them together to help lift people out of poverty and give them a freedom from want.

A generation of entrepreneurs will mop up poverty at a rate that no government ever could.

At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race, economic independence.

The great mass of our poor white population begin to understand that they have rights, and that they, too, are entitled to some of the sympathy which falls upon the suffering. They are fast learning that there is an almost infinite world of industry opening before them, by which they can elevate themselves and their families from wretchedness and ignorance to competence and intelligence..

Let’s make the poor richer.

I wish that every Chinese citizen can live a life of satisfaction, every peasant child can go to school and every person reaching a working age can have a job. I wish people wouldn't have to worry about medical care if they are sick, particularly those in rural areas. I believe that this is the dream of every Chinese person.

The thing that the government does very well is to write checks. Get rid of all the bureaucracy and programs and just write check [to the poor].

People need to have enough to eat and have work and money. But there are other things that are important.

Information, education, skills, healthcare, livelihood, financial inclusion, small and village enterprises, opportunities for women, conservation of natural resources, distributed clean energy - entirely new possibilities have emerged to change the development model.

What we need is a safety net that lifts people out of poverty - that helps them earn a good paycheck so they can support themselves.

If we are all endowed by our creator with the right to pursue happiness, that has to apply to the poorest neighborhoods in the poorest counties, and I am prepared to find something that works, that breaks us out of the cycles we have now to find a way for poor children to work and earn honest money.

If you enter the World Bank office in Washington, D.C., you will see written on the left wall, 'The purpose of the World Bank is to fight poverty with passion.' I had it put up there because I wanted something that unites us as an institution.