Thomas Pogge Quotes

There are levels of poverty in South Africa that are totally unacceptable.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age.

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.

For the first time in human history, society has the capacity, the knowledge and the resources to eradicate poverty

...let us recognize that extreme poverty anywhere is a threat to human security everywhere. Let us recall that poverty is a denial of human rights. For the first time in history, in this age of unprecedented wealth and technical prowess, we have the power to save humanity from this shameful scourge. Let us summon the will to do it.

Poverty is not inevitable. It is a human ill that we can fight if we decide to do so together.

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

Will we make all poverty history? No. But can we solve some of these extreme and egregious forms of poverty? I think yes, and we should.

My goal is to eradicate poverty. I think we can't have equality until we eradicate poverty.

Poverty is not natural; it is man-made

We think of violence as being conflict and fighting and wars and so forth, but the most ongoing horrific measure of violence is in the horrible poverty of the Third World... and the poverty in the United States as well. We have our own Third World here. And we have to first become aware of that and how to help and solve that.

The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.

We believe that poverty does not belong in a civilized human society. It belongs in museums [...] A poverty-free world might not be perfect, but it would be the best approximation of the ideal.

Half of the world lives on [about] $2 a day. If there is a hungry kid in the world, we shouldn't consider ourselves more evolved than homo habilis.

Poverty is curable, but it’s just not done, because it's not profitable. And that is the kind of violence that's perpetuated on humanity.

We all have the chance to create a world where extreme poverty is the exception rather than the rule.

Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.

The only place where poverty should be is in museums.

I loathed poverty and I would have liked to put my hands on the party who said that poverty is an honorable estate. It is an indication of inefficiency and nothing more. There is nothing honorable or fine about it.

we're focusing too much energy on the symptom rather than the disease: Our real enemy is poverty, not welfare.

Some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.

Poverty is a plague against which humanity must fight without cease.

There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.

The international community... allows nearly 3 billion people - almost half of all humanity - to subsist on $2 or less a day in a world of unprecedented wealth.

Poverty is the frontier we have to be able to cross.