QUOTES
End Poverty Quotes

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* "If poverty is a disease that infects the entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat those symptoms in isolation . We have to heal that entire community." -- Barack Obama

The international trading system was devised by the rich to suit their needs; it ignores those of the poor.'
-- Pope Paul VI

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.
-- Plutarch

* The good news is we have the technology and the tools to alleviate poverty on a global scale. All that is standing in our way is education and will. -- Natalie Portman * Small loans can transform lives, especially the lives of women and children. The poor can become empowered instead of disenfranchised. Homes can be built, jobs can be created, businesses can be launched, and individuals can feel a sense of worth again. -- Natalie Portman

He who oppresses the poor to increase his wealth and he who gives gifts to the rich--both come to poverty.
-- Proverbs 22:16

* The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have enough; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"The key to ending extreme poverty is to enable the poorest of the poor to get their foot on the ladder of development. The ladder of development hovers overhead, and the poorest of the poor are stuck beneath it. They lack the minimum amount of capital necessary to get a foothold, and therefore need a boost up to the first rung. "
-- Jeffrey Sachs

"Every morning our newspapers could read, 'More than 20,000 people perished yesterday of extreme poverty.' How? The poor die in hospital wards that lack drugs, in villages that lack antimalarial bed nets, in houses that lack safe drinking water. They die namelessly, without public comment. Sadly, sad stories rarely get written."
-- Jeffrey Sachs

All of the incessant debate about development assistance, and whether the rich are doing enough to help the poor, actually concerns less than 1% of rich world income. The effort required of the rich is indeed so slight that to do less is to announce brazenly to a large part of the world: 'You count for nothing.' We should not be surprised, then, if in later years the rich reap the whirlwind of that heartless response.
-- Jeffrey Sachs

The rich do not have to invest enough in the poorest countries to make them rich; they need to invest enough so that these countries can get their foot on the economic ladder . . . Economic development works. It can be successful. It tends to build on itself. But it must get started.
-- Jeffrey Sachs

The essence of Africa's crisis is fundamentally its extreme poverty and therefore its inability to mobilize out of its own resources even the barest of minimum resources to address any of the public health crises that Africa faces.
-- Jeffrey Sachs

Our interconnectedness on the planet is the dominating truth of the 21st century. One stark result is that the world's poor live, and especially die, with the awareness that the United States is doing little to mobilise the weapons of mass salvation that could offer them survival, dignity and eventually the escape from poverty.
-- Jeffrey Sachs

"When the rich make war, it's the poor that die."
-- Jean-Paul Sartre

* I attempted to see famines as broad "economic" problems (concentrating on how people can buy food, or otherwise get entitled to it), rather than in terms of the grossly undifferentiated picture of aggregate food supply for the economy as a whole. -- Amartya Sen

* "We know that many boys and girls leave school because of poverty, because they have to work. However, there are an important number of children who abandon their studies because of the abuses they're subject to by teachers and their own parents." -- Shakira

Security, the chief pretense of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head
-- George Bernard Shaw

The first world is going to have to account for this sort of horrible poverty in our midst. We have to, first of all, become aware of it. We have to take responsibility for it. And then we have to do something about it for our own freedom, for our own salvation, for our own humanity. -- Martin Sheen * We think of violence as being conflict and fighting and wars and so forth, but the most ongoing horrific measure of violence is in the horrible poverty of the Third World… and the poverty in the United States as well. We have our own Third World here. And we have to first become aware of that and how to help and solve that. -- Martin Sheen

Once you experience Third World poverty, you're really changed forever, if you're at all open to it, because we're all united in our common humanity. And we are so made as to feel something for people who are in pain. It's not possible to be human and to be unaffected by what you see in the third world.
-- Martin Sheen

Somewhere near you, somebody right now is trying to help the indigent and poor - providing food, shelter, clothing or simple kindness.
-- Tony Snow

* Most of the poverty and misery in the world is due to bad government, lack of democracy, weak states, internal strife, and so on. -- George Soros

Unions have been the best anti-poverty program that actually worked and did not cost the government a dime. But as unions grow smaller- not stronger- our ability to act as an economic mechanism to distribute the gains of our work and raise all workers' wages and benefits up is disappearing.
-- Andy Stern, SEIU President

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