Kofi Annan Quotes

There are two billion fellow human beings who live on less than $2 a day.

My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack.

We have three billion people, half the world's population today, living on less than two dollars a day.

The working poor is a growing population in this country.

I understand that people might be poor if they don't have any work, but I don't accept that someone is poor if they've worked really hard.

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.

The poverty line is like the age of consent: if you find yourself parsing exactly where it is, you’ve probably already done something very, very wrong.

The bottom quarter of the human population has only three-quarters of one percent of global household income, about one thirty-second of the average income in the world, whereas the people in the top five percent have nine times the average income. So the ratio between the averages in the top five percent and the bottom quarter is somewhere around 300 to one - a huge inequality that also gives you a sense of how easily poverty could be avoided.

My people are poor and I am one of them.

Poverty is what we call the extremes at the bottom.

The poverty of the West is far more difficult to solve than the poverty of India.

On a macro level, four billion people on Earth make less than four dollars a day.

My parents worked their tails off, but we weren't the poorest people in town. Some people I went to school with, you could tell they were dirt poor.

I've still got family members living below the poverty line in New York.

I don't want there to be this separation between the rich and poor. I may be part of the three percent because I've been fortunate and done well for myself, but I will never forget about the 97 percent. That was me growing up. I was so poor I dreamt about being just 'regular poor,' not 'poor, poor.'

Half the people of the world are living on less than $2 a day.

The United States has the highest poverty rate [and] the greatest … wealth inequality of any major developed economy in the world…. No other developed country is as addicted to poverty and inequality as we are, and yet somehow they prosper.

I was one of the poorest people in America.

I don't really care much about what the top one per cent earn. The gap we ought to care about in wealth is between the middle and the bottom.

In America, the 1 percent and the 10 percent are doing just fine, but the people who are bearing the brunt of this economy are the ones who suffer.

Severe poverty is getting better by some measures, but it's also becoming ever more scandalous because it is now so easily avoidable.

One of the things that struck me when I came to the U.S. was discovering American poverty.

Poverty ennobles no one; it brutalizes common people and makes them hungry and old.

We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.

Imagine what would happen if the government were to take the wealth of 200,000 of India's richest people and redistribute it amongst 2 million of India's poorest? We would hear a lot about socialist appropriation and the death of democracy. Why should taking from the rich be called appropriation and taking from the poor be called development?