Rural Poverty Quotes

Who maintains the pubs and makes the peasants drunk? The peasant. Who embezzles the village, school, and parish funds and spends it all on drink? The peasant. Who robs his neighbor, sets fire to his house, and perjures himself in court for a bottle of vodka? The peasant.

Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.

It is the peasant, the true producer, who is also the true owner and master of Turkey.

My family has been poor and working-class for generations. And we live - I live in this really small community in Southern Mississippi where you don't evacuate, and you have never evacuated because there are too many people in your family to evacuate.

This demand for fixity of tenure is not, as is often supposed, a mere cry of disaffected and impracticable Socialists. It springs from a vague but true perception of the causes of the depression under which the agricultural interest, and with it the whole prosperity of Ireland, labors

The factors that have been holding farmers back are similar to those that threaten other types of growth in Africa. Infrastructure and transport are in many cases quite poor, resulting in the losses of huge amounts of produce.

Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female.

[Should we] pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of ‘honest journalism”?

Every country has a part that is undeveloped.

The poor peasant here hives under conditions quite different from those of Russia. Though often terrible, they are not as appalling as they were there.

Most of the people in the world are poor, so if we knew the economics of being poor, we would know much of the economics that really matters. Most of the world's poor people earn their living from agriculture, so if we knew the economics of agriculture, we would know much of the economics of being poor.

India lives in her villages, we are told in every other sanctimonious public speech, That's bullshit. India doesn't live in her villages. India dies in her villages. India gets kicked around in her villages. India lives in her cities. India's villages just live only to serve her cities. Her villages are her citizen's vassals and for that reason must be controlled and kept alive, but only just.

Today, somewhere in America, more foreclosures. More auctions. Another farmer plots his own death. And another. There is an art to making your death by combine look like an accident.

Land ownership in Guatemala is more unequal than anywhere else in Latin America. Roughly 90 percent of Guatemalan farms are too small to support a family. A tiny group of Guatemalans owns a third of the country's arable land; more than 300,000 landless peasants must scrounge a living as best they can.

I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well.

I grew up in small-town America, black, disadvantaged.

One of the many economic differences between developed and developing countries is that developed countries subsidize farmers while developing countries tax farmers.

What's popular in places considered ghettos - whether that's the inner city or Appalachia - is having a decent quality of life.

Appalachia, my state, eastern Kentucky, has a large amount of poverty.

Bad farming in Ireland is due to want of education and to the enhanced subdivision of the land. When the farmer gets higher up the social scale he will have more sense than to make beggars of his children by subdivision

One time at the University of Colorado, at a faculty dinner, this professor said to me, 'Well, my goodness, a boy from Appa-lay-chee-a with a Ph.D!' The dinner was in her house. And I said, 'My grandparents didn't have indoor plumbing, but they had more books in their house than you do.' I was a little insulted by the Appa-lay-chee-a business.

I'd have to pick cotton for a year to make what I'd make in a week in L.A.

In England, the population explosion can be linked very clearly with the enclosure of the commons that uprooted the peasants from their land. In India, it was the same thing: the population increased at the end of the 18th century when the British took over and Indian lands were colonized. Instead of the land feeding Indian people it started to feed the British empire. So we had destitution. Destitute people who don't have their own land to feed themselves can only feed themselves by having larger numbers, therefore they multiply. It's the rational response of a dispossessed people.

When you hear that China is overcrowded, that's an understatement. I was shocked at the number of people. Even in the rural areas. I was also shocked at the poverty and at the living conditions.

Clean water and access to food are some of the simplest things that we can take for granted each and every day. In places like Africa, these can be some of the hardest resources to attain if you live in a rural area.