We need to realize that poverty doesn’t only consist of being hungry for bread, but rather it is a tremendous hunger for human dignity. We need to love and to be someone for someone else

I have yet to know a poor man who has nostalgia for poverty.

“the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself—or will use military violence against another country—is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it’s violence against females. It normalizes all other violence.” 

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

“In fact, there are many unique satisfactions here. One is that Americans seem to outstrip every nation for hope. Perhaps because so many of us came in flight from something worse, or rose from poverty here, or absorbed the fact and fiction of the “land of opportunity,” or just because optimism itself is contagious—whatever the reason, hopefulness is what I miss the most when I’m not here. It’s the thing that makes me glad to come home. After all, hope is a form of planning.”

“the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself—or will use military violence against another country—is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it’s violence against females. It normalizes all other violence.” 

“We might have known sooner that the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself—or will use military violence against another country—is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it’s violence against females. It normalizes all other violence.” 

“Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.”

“By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men.” –

“If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.”

The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age.

 As long as there is poverty in the world I can never be rich, even if I have a billion dollars.

Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.

Most poor people live in the poorest countries.