Abhijit Banerjee Quotes

It is not squalid people who produce the squalid housing; it is the squalid housing that makes squalid people.

I was shocked when I came to New Orleans. I never knew there were beggars on the streets here. I didn't know that there were poor people. I thought this was Heaven, you know?

I'd been in Sacramento a day and already noticed the pervasiveness of its homeless problem. The city seemed like California without the masks or pretense: a place where dreams were occasionally made but mostly torn apart.

Poverty and lack of education are ruining our planet.

I've always stood on one fact - that all over the world, there are only two things, the Establishment and the poor people. The poor people are a massive majority and across the world they are exploited in different kinds of ways. The Establishment depends on exploiting raw materials and the poor.

Drag a $100 bill through a trailer camp and there's no telling what you will find.

An infernal machine that produces every minute an impressive amount of poor, 26 million poor in 10 years are 2.6 million per year of new poor, this is the road, well, the road to hell.

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

In all the world there is not, perhaps, now concentrated in any single spot so much swindling and villainy, so much foul disease, such a hideous dung-heap of moral and physical abomination as in the scene of this far-famed undertaking of nineteenth-century engineering

I often think that people who write a lot about poverty need to go and spend more time with poor people.

Being raised in a developing country opened my eyes to so much I cannot tolerate. In Colombia, education is sometimes considered a luxury, not a human right. And it's not a priority in the agendas of many leaders.

South Tel Aviv has turned into the garbage can of the country.

We live in a world where there is so much wealth. There shouldn't be a homeless person. That's crazy.

None of us want to live in a society where people are forced to sleep in shop doorways, on park benches or in dangerous, run-down buildings.

Vast areas are witness to the struggles of destitute populations trying to survive under unlivable conditions.

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.'

I travel around the world, experiencing every language, every religion... some places where there's just no reason to smile, because their lives are so difficult.

We cannot afford to leave the poor behind.

We need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people will die just because they are poor.

Few, save the poor, feel for the poor.

I have spent all my life advocating on behalf of the poor, oppressed and marginalized. As a social justice and human rights activist, and now as President of the Republic of Malawi, I have a deep appreciation for the challenges of those on the margins of society.

I've lived places these guys can't defecate in.

I don't think anyone sets out to malign poor people but certainly that's what we do through organizations such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Sub-Saharan Africa is also home to 400 million of the world's poorest people.

I'm concerned about - the oppression of the poor.