Chinese Proverb Quotes

In the Java Sea in Indonesia, I have seen fishers going out in the morning, six of them going out and coming back with five pounds of fish. That is the end point, a pound of fish per person per day to sell for rice. That's where fisheries go if you let it happen. That's where it stabilizes. These people cannot feed their families.

Right now you're seeing more and more families reporting that they are skipping meals. They're having to give up meat. Mothers are foregoing food so their kids can have something. People are growing their own vegetables, not because they've gone organic, but because it's one of the few assured sources of food they have. For low-income Americans food is costly right now. The price of food has been going up, and wages haven't. This puts working Americans in a real bind. The fact that the mainstream media hasn't reported it doesn't mean that it's not happening.

Every day I've got to hear about unemployment and people starving.

Does anyone really believe it is possible to make even the most basic ends meet on $5.15 an hour?

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

People who didn't know the depression just don't know what being poor means.

There is no starvation in China today. This is something that has not ever been achieved by any other government in China – ever.

When you introduce markets in food, then you introduce two very simple rules. The first rule is this: if you have money you can get the food from wherever around the world. The other rule markets impose is this: if you do not have money, you will starve. ... The reason why people starve is because of poverty ... not because of a shortage of food ... but because the only way to access the food is through the market.

Now all of you know that right now the federal minimum wage is a starvation wage.

Too many jobs don't pay enough to get by, let alone get ahead.

Economy, the poor man's mint.

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.

People talk about doom-laden scenarios happening in the future: they are happening in Africa now. You can see it perfectly clearly. Periodic famines are due to too many people living on land that can't sustain them.

How can anyone live off of minimum wage?

Physical hunger and physical poverty is something I could only imagine. I've been poor when I was in China... As kids we never had to starve, but just didn't have enough meat, enough rice.

I was very poor and I was a waitress, and it's hard to be a poor waitress in New York.

People are hungry not because there aren't enough farmers or food, but because they don't have access to it or can't afford it.

You must go deeper into Russia - 150 kilometres from Moscow or more, and look there. The kids are fed with cattle feed - people don't get paid for half a year.

For too many, to work means having less income.

There's not much money in Tallahassee. Not many people can leave Tallahassee because they don't have the means.

Over one in five American children is living in poverty, and the number is rising.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

In reality, most of America's poor work hard, often in two or more jobs.

The current minimum wage simply is not supporting Ohio's working families.

When food prices surge, poor families suddenly find themselves unable to afford enough nutritious food. If this happens during the first thousand days of a child's life, the damage to his or her body and mind can be permanent.