Systemic Poverty Quotes

Individual effort is almost relatively impossible to cope with the big problem of poverty as we see it.

Poverty is not the simple result of bad geography, bad culture, bad history. It's the result of us: of the ways that people choose to organize their societies.

Like a lot of black people, I grew up straight po'. Wasn't no question about whether we was po', either. If you really wanted to know, all you had to do was look in our refrigerator.

But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution.

There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery

Poor people do not cause poverty. Poverty is thrust upon them.

Oppression makes a poor country.

America has seen enough of a handful of people growing rich at the cost of our nation descending into economic crisis.

The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations.

Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn't have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America's poor deserve better than this.

The worst part of great poverty is that you become blind to it.

Poverty is not a trait of character. It is created anew in each generation but not by heredity, by circumstances.

The great mass of the poor in countries are become an hereditary race, and it is next to impossible them to get out of that state of themselves

After a generation of misrule under Mr. Hussein, who built a huge military infrastructure while neglecting civilian investment, and a dozen years of United Nations sanctions, Iraq's unemployment rate tops 50 percent.

Poverty does not create our social problems...our social problems create our poverty.

Hunger is almost like something the West does. It's almost like the direct result of the way the West performs.

The issue of poverty is not a statistical issue. It is a human issue.

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

Man's inhumanity to man is not the last word. The truth lies deeper. It is economic slavery, the savage struggle for a crumb, that has converted mankind into wolves and sheep.

The chaos of poverty feeds on itself.

So i say, change the base! If you change the base, anybody will be as tall as anybody else! My belief is poverty is not caused by poor ppl. Poverty is caused by the system. Poverty is caused by the policies that we pursue.

The notion that aid can alleviate systemic poverty, and has done so, is a myth. Millions in Africa are poorer today because of aid; misery and poverty have not ended but increased. Aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world.

The image of blacks usually is one of people who are suffering from hunger, unemployment, and poverty. The idea of them as agents and activists - as starting revolutions - does not exist in most people's minds. And I think it's very, very important that folks understand how much this country was founded on the enslavement of blacks, and how the resistance of blacks to that enslavement has been the spark plug for so many important developments.

So long as the great majority of the poor in any country are inert and are laboring without any hope in this world, the whole associated life of that community rests on an equivocal foundation. Its moral and social order is tied to an economic system which starves and mutilates the great majority of the population, and under such conditions its religion necessarily becomes a spiritual drug, administered for the purpose of subduing the popular discontent and relieving the popular misery.

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