Indira Gandhi Quotes

Relative poverty acknowledges that the definition of poverty should move with the times.

Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.

I've been working on issues of poverty for more than 20 years, and so it's ironic that the problem that and question that I most grapple with is how you actually define poverty. What does it mean?

It is absolute poverty that you could end, but I think relative poverty is a whole other issue.

In the past we used to think of poverty in absolute terms - meaning straightforward material deprivation... We need to think of poverty in relative terms - the fact that some people lack those things which others in society take for granted.

I think in some ways it would make more sense to have as a poverty level a relative concept and say, the level of poverty is that level of income or that level of consumption below which 10 percent of the people now are.

In comparative terms, there's no poverty in America by a long shot. Heritage Foundation political scientist Robert Rector has worked up figures showing that when the official U.S. measure of poverty was developed in 1963, a poor American family had an income twenty-nine times greater than the average per capita income in the rest of the world. An individual American could make more money than 93 percent of the other people on the planet and still be considered poor.

A common measure of poverty is how much money you have in relation to other people - that is useful as far as it goes, but that excludes the case of, say, a hunter in the rainforest who has no money but is not poor. And there can be a number of people with money but who can consider themselves unwanted or invisible or estranged from society.

As society advances the standard of poverty rises.

Growing richer every day, for as rich and poor are relative terms, when the rich are growing poor, it is pretty much the same as if the poor were growing rich. Nobody is poor when the distinction between rich and poor is destroyed.

The poverty one still sees in America today is more shocking to me than anything I have seen in Ethiopia or Calcutta or Manila, and has made me, as someone living in a society of great wealth and someone who's never had to worry about the next meal, think seriously about what universal responsibility really means.

One of the biggest challenges facing the globe is the gap that exists in the wealth and standards of living enjoyed by the world's nations.

I've never been anywhere in my life like it and I only really noticed it when I returned to Los Angeles and then Berlin. Everybody is much better off in these places, there is not poverty like in Cuba, but everybody complains about things.

Nobody in America lives at the survival level, Most people in the world would love to live the way poor Americans live.

It is easy to say that there are the rich and the poor, and so something should be done. But in history, there are always the rich and the poor. If the poor were not as poor, we would still call them the poor. I mean, whoever has less can be called the poor. You will always have the 10% that have less and the 10% that have the most.

The World Bank adjusts its poverty estimates for differences in prices across countries, but it ignores differences in needs.

By repealing the Child Poverty Act, which forced governments to take real action to tackle child poverty, this government brings a proud chapter of British history to an undignified end. In future the government will measure child poverty not by looking at whether they have any money, but by looking at their so-called 'life chances.'

The poverty line in the U.S., for example, has nothing to do with the poverty line in India. It is a relative poverty line. It is reset from time to time but it is related to U.S. median income, so if I set that to be the absolute poverty line everyone in India would essentially be poor.

While economic development [in Egypt] made a few people rich, it left many more worse off. As people felt less and less free, they also felt less and less provided for.

I spent almost 25 years as a foreign correspondent, and the world's primary problem is poverty.

There will be a debate on Firing Line between Buckley and Gore Vidal on the proposition: "This nation cannot survive as long as the income of 50 percent of the population is below the median." Mr. Vidal will take the affirmative.

The poverty of yesterday was less squalid than the poverty we purchase with our industry today. Fortunes were smaller then as well.

A poverty that is universal may be cheerfully borne; it is an individual poverty that is painful and humiliating.

Poverty is relative, and, therefor not ignoble.

In India, the poverty is so vast that the state cannot control it. It can beat people, but it can't prevent the poor from flooding the roads, the cities, the parks and railway station platforms.