P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty.

You are not going to lift everybody out of poverty through the kindness of wealthy people.

You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer.

The only way to have a better world and end poverty is by closing the gap between the top and the bottom.

Pope Francis emphatically does not buy the argument that poverty can be alleviated by the 'trickle down' effects of wealth creation. He is deaf to arguments that the global economy has brought a billion people out of poverty. He is convinced, in short, that the best and only way to expel poverty is fairer distribution of the world's goods.

It is our sacred obligation to eliminate the curse of poverty in the shortest possible time. This is non-negotiable for the Republic.

If we are serious about breaking cycles of poverty, we have to change this (economy).

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.

I've often said that far more sensible than a 'make poverty history' campaign would be a 'make wealth history' campaign. It is, after all, the wealthy people who do all the damage. The less money you earn, the fewer resources you use up.

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

Franklin Roosevelt said the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance to those who have much; it is whether we provide enough to those who have too little. This reconciliation package fails that test as well.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

Even the best community organizations and faith-based initiatives and the extraordinary charity of Americans across the country can't carry the brunt of eliminating poverty.

Alleviating poverty would be the Bank's overarching objective.

Trickle-down theories do not address the legitimate aspirations of the poor. We must lift those at the bottom so that poverty is erased from the dictionary of modern India.

We want an economic team, Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner, Joseph Steiglitz's people and others, who say, you know what? We're sophisticated economists but we're concerned about poor and working people.

It is because of capitalism that we can pay for services to poor people that we don't even know.

Reducing poverty is in our own interest.

The poorhouse is vanishing from among us.... We ... today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.... We shall soon ... be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.

For the first time in America's history, poverty is on the run.

There never can be equality of rewards or possessions so long as the human plan contains varied talents and differing degrees of industry and thrift, but ours ought to be a country free from the great blotches of distressed poverty.

We used to wage war on poverty—not poor people.

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

There is no question that we, as a country, need to deal with economic inequality across the country, and we need to make sure we have good-paying jobs for everyone.

You alleviate poverty by trickle-down economics.