Sunil Yapa Quotes

Collectively, we activists are essential to advancing U.S. policy to help empower marginalized people to lift themselves and their communities out of poverty for good.

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.

I would like to solemnly reaffirm, that poverty is not a fatality.

Poverty was not caused by the churches; so how can the churches solve the poverty problem?

There should be whole-hearted, full commitment to remove poverty - only we are doing it.

To see poor people, their benefits being cut, to see pensions of Americans who have worked like my father, all their lives, and taken away, to see the rich just accumulating more and more wealth. I mean, it seems to me that there has to be a point where you have to say, 'No, this has to stop.'

I say to the Occupy protesters - you're occupying the wrong place, you're protesting the wrong thing.

Poverty-fighting programs are not handouts - they are investments.

I want to eradicate poverty. I think that there's a tremendous passion for that inside the World Bank.

When I want to explain why empowering girls and women is critical to fighting poverty, I often tell a person's story. It's easier to relate to a personal story than to global data telling us that the majority of the billion people who live on less than $2 per day are women and girls. We are often told to never treat a person like a statistic.

… mankind will no longer passively submit to crushing poverty with its effects of death, disease, and decline.

Attacking poverty is very expensive, and means doing things politically that are either impossible or very difficult to bring off.

Preventing poverty beats curing it.

The war on poverty had not been undertaken at the request of the poor.

Mere political reform will not cure the manifold evils which now afflict society. There requires a social reform, a domestic reform, an individual reform.

In the 19th century, some people looked at the condition of slavery and said that it was monstrous and unconscionable; that it must be abolished. ... Today the condition of hunger in a world of plenty is equally monstrous and unconscionable and it too must be abolished. We must become the 'new abolitionists'.

Destroy poverty, that source of crime, by assuring to each the satisfaction of all needs! And how difficult is this to achieve?

We will not rest until this war [on poverty] is won.

A universal voucher program would change the face of poverty in this country.

You meet folks who are funny and really smart and persistent and loving that are confronting this thing we call poverty, which is just a shorthand for this way of life that holds you underwater. And you just wonder what our country would be if we allowed these people to flourish and reach their full potential.

Too often, while well-intentioned, our poverty programs fail the poor. They fail them by keeping them in cycles of dependency.

The global capitalist project, which we are all a part of, leaves people behind. I don't know what the answers are - I don't think any actor does - but figuring it out through entertainment can be very useful.

President Obama started in public life not as an elected official but as a community organizer. He worked with churches and other groups on the south side of Chicago to push public leaders to fight poverty, improve the local school system and make housing more affordable, and to bring about the change the community needed and deserved.

I thought I could make change by just working at ground level, but to change a community, you have to change policies.

The fight against poverty and hunger must be fought constantly and on many fronts, especially in its causes.