Cycle of Poverty Quotes

The way the [welfare] programs are organized, poor people are only paid to do things that are counter-productive - such as breaking up their families, such as not earning above a certain level of income.

The slave labors, but with no cheer - it is not the road to respectability, it will honor him with no citizens' trust, it brings no bread to his family, no grain to his garner, no leisure in after-days, no books or papers to his children. It opens no school-house door, builds no church, rears for him no factory, lays no keel, fills no bank, earns no acres. With sweat and toil and ignorance he consumes his life, to pour the earnings into channels from which he does no drink, into hands that never honor him. But perpetually rob and often torment.

When charity perpetuates dependency and subordination, it is unjust…. You can help desperately needy people in ways that disempower them and turn them into permanent clients, or you can help them in ways that promote their independence and enable them to help themselves.

With sad, depressing predictability, the children of today's underclass become tomorrow's criminals and dropouts.

The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness and low self-esteem interact to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin.

Poverty, for me, is synonymous with degradation.

Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works.

What hurts me most is poverty, and that's what led me to become a rebel.

Poverty fled, she who gives birth to virile men.

The poor are the only ones who suffer. And they're used to it.

Poverty is an expensive luxury. We cannot afford it.

At Camfed, we have focused on transforming the vicious cycle of poverty in many rural African communities into a cycle of opportunity. Alumnae of Camfed's programs go on to become role models and mentors for future generations of young students. We call this the 'virtuous circle,' and we know this is a model that works.

Black folks don't have a chance, so they are in the hood, dealing drugs, in a shoot-out. They do it again and one more time they are out.

Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soulless army of human prey.

Poverty is what we call the extremes at the bottom.

I started my own Pies Descalzos/Barefoot Foundation when I was 18. We provide education to vulnerable children in Colombia and other developing countries. I am an avid believer that education - and especially early childhood development - is the key to breaking the cycle of poverty.

Giving a poor person money keeps them poor.

Poverty palls the most generous spirits; it cows industry, and casts resolution itself into despair.

I grew in a community where I saw the process of how one becomes a drug dealer or a gang banger or a stick-up kid. There's a series of events that happen. People don't just wake up and decide they wanna be that.

To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.

There is definitely places in America where, if you're born into that environment, your chances of getting out are really, really limited.

POVERTY, n. A file provided for the teeth of the rats of reform. Its victims are distinguished by possession of all the virtues and by their faith in leaders seeking to conduct them into a prosperity where they believe these to be unknown.

To be able to proclaim the Good News to the poor we must know what is poverty.

On a cold and gray Chicago morning another little baby child is born in the ghetto, and his Mama cries.

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.'