Those born into poverty or on the margins of society require our extra support to realize their dreams.
Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.
None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.
Illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our time - more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare or homelessness because it drives everything else.
I think that America in general is piratical. Every time we accept a paycheck for doing almost nothing, allowing us to live above the poverty line, we're engaging in piracy.
There are worse things than poverty, though I can't for the moment remember what they are.
Spring cold is like the poverty of a poor man who has had a fortune left him - better days are coming.
Of all the advantages which come to any young man. . . poverty is the greatest.
To really tackle poverty, politicians, activists, academics will all have to think outside their boxes, will have to start developing much more integrated approaches to these problems. And a large part of this will involve working out ways to push for living wages. Partly this will involve re-empowering the union movement, which has been massively weakened in recent decades. Partly it will involve a willingness to restructure tax codes to penalize companies that don't provide basic benefits and decent wages to employees.
Poverty should not be viewed by us as a humiliation and even less so as a position of honour or a fatality.
The poor are only they who feel poor.
I grew up in a very modest house. We were poor-we lived on the poverty level. We all got jobs as young kids.
Too many of the conflicts which are caused today are caused by the problems that emerge from people who are in poverty.
Gold gives an appearance of beauty even to ugliness: but with poverty everything becomes frightful.
The things I really cared about - poverty, the Great Society, civil rights - were all being drained away by the Vietnam War. The line that keeps running through my mind is the line I never spoke: "I can't speak for a war that I believe is immoral. "
People from both political parties have long recognized that welfare without work creates negative incentives that lead to permanent poverty. It robs people of self-esteem.
That is one of the bitter curses of poverty; it leaves no right to be generous.
We could never light another match, and if China continues to build one coal-fired power plant a week, we are doomed. China is going to have to have new technologies made available to it to stop this. They're not going to live in poverty.
If the Fed had a war on abortion like its war on poverty or war on drugs, within five years men would be having abortions!
This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed.