Breaking the Cycle of Poverty Quotes

Every literate woman is a victory over poverty

Most poor people I know are proud and really want not a handout but a hand up. They do have an inherent pride and dignity, and we should treat them as those who have fallen on bad days.

Poverty will not be allowed to become a wall in the way of education.

My family were very poor. We never owned a house, in fact, we were lucky if we could afford the rent. So when I bought my first home, it was a very emotional time for me.

One of the over-riding things for many who grow up in poverty is the simple desire to escape. I think it was sort of obvious to me that escape had to be through education.

I know a lot of people who are weak, who are in a perpetual cycle of poverty and being locked up. There are guys from my neighborhood who are in jail or who are dead. It does take a certain strength to know your environment and say, 'I can grow beyond it.'

Poverty urges us to do and suffer anything that we may escape from it, and so leads us away from virtue.

Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

Literacy could be the ladder out of poverty

Compassion, however, should mean providing a mechanism to escape poverty rather than simply maintaining people in an impoverished state by supplying handouts. By doing this we give them an opportunity to elevate their personal situations, which eventually decreases our need to take care of them and empowers them to be able to exercise compassion toward others.

I came from a very poor family and my main dream in life was to break out of this poverty.

What you see around the world is that poverty is not destiny. In other countries, much more systemically, student after student, school after school, year after year, educate poor and disadvantaged young people. And, so, anyone who says that you can't overcome these battles is a huge part of the problem.

I learned that unless you start working, if you're frozen out of work, you will never learn the habits, the discipline, the values of cooperation and improvement unless you get a job, and that's what statistic show. It's, unless you get a job and keep it, you will not get out of poverty. If you do, you have a very good chance of working out of poverty.

Anticipate charity by preventing poverty; assist the reduced fellow man, either by a considerable gift or a sum of money or by teaching him a trade or by putting him in the way of business so that he may earn an honest livelihood and not be forced to the dreadful alternative of holding out his hand for charity. This is the highest step and summit of charity's golden ladder.

To be able to help a 13-year-old kid from the Bronx follow her dreams just by letting her know she's not forgotten in this crazy world - that's why I got involved with Frum Tha Ground Up.

There are exceptional schools in many of our most disadvantaged neighborhoods throughout the Commonwealth. Proving they can get it done for kids, no matter what their circumstances.

We need to find ways to elevate the expectations, particularly of those individuals who may start off on a lower socioeconomic rung, who might be seen as disadvantaged. But, you know, the reason I say be seen as disadvantaged, it's because life is so short, and there's so much that can change.

I come from a hut, from a hut I went to the projects, from the projects I went to a mansion so you out there you have ABSOLUTLY NO EXCUSE!

The poor are an especially important resource for innovation when they have the bravery and pluck to get out of the poor places in which they're living.

Education is the key to opportunity. It's a ticket out of poverty.

I think that education is a pathway out of poverty for many people. It was for our family.

Using the Africanist model, each generation should take the family name to a higher place. My father's folks were sharecroppers in South Carolina. He went to Harlem. They were still poor, but they moved up. If my parents didn't do this and offer me this background, I wouldn't be here.

We always come back to the same vicious circle - an extreme degree of material or intellectual poverty does away with the means of alleviating it.

There is a place in God's sun for the youth "farthest down" who has the vision, the determination, and the courage to reach it.

It's no secret that my family was very, very poor, and I don't want that for my life or my children's life certainly. But some might say I could relax a bit more and know that that's not going to happen to me. I'm not going to end up in a car.