Paul Collier Quotes

If you are poor today, you will always be poor. Only the rich now acquire riches.

You've got first-generation Americans here who are going to be poorer than their parents. That's never happened in the States before, and it's going to have massive social repercussions here.

India has political freedom but it does not have economic freedom.

The ability to take advantage of freedom and democracy is proportional to the size of your bank account.

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

They do not easily rise whose abilities are repressed by poverty at home.

The great mass of the poor in countries are become an hereditary race, and it is next to impossible them to get out of that state of themselves

In the first phase of economic development you have rising inequality.

If you are a pregnant teenage poor girl, you will not likely ever get out of poverty. Nor will your children. Birth control can be the most cost effective anti-poverty possibility that we have.

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, so there was always a sense of struggle, but we had hope.

Today, if you were raised poor, you're just as likely to stay poor as you were 50 years ago.

Countries are poor not because their people are lazy; their people are 'lazy' because they are poor.

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.

Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty

To be poor, and to seem poor, is a certain method never to rise.

Broke is temporary, poor is eternal.

If you are low income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than getting a 4-year degree.

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

As for poverty, no one need be ashamed to admit it, the real shame is in not taking practical measures to escape from it.

Poor people always lose in struggles.

Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.

I wanted to raise the voice of a lot of the people that I knew growing up, and this was, for the most part, poor people who had extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles.

Too many people feel that where you start out dictates where you should end up. I was on welfare and just shy of 19 when my first daughter was born, but I was encouraged to take advantage of my ability and drive and remained in school.

When you talk about war on poverty it doesn't mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.