poverty

It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.

This time of year," she said, "people__ consciences gnaw at them. They give away truckloads of canned goods and quote Dickens and wring their hands over the __ess fortunate._" We boarded the Metro and took seats perpendicular to each other. "But God forbid anyone should address why they__e poor in the first place, or try to change the structures that keep them poor. Then the __ess fortunate_ turn into __elfare queens_ and __erelicts._ But if I were a lobbyist whoring on behalf of some transnational corporation, I__ never hear the word __erelict._""So when it comes to taking care of poor people," I said, "if Mother Teresa is the Hallmark card, then you__e the electric bill.

I believe that the emphasis on curbing population growth diverts attention from the more vital issue of pursuing policies that allow the population to take care of itself.

Poverty always looks the same, no matter where you come across it. The rich can always express their opulence by varying their lives. Different houses, clothes, cars. Or thoughts, dreams. But for the poor there is nothing but compulsory grayness, the only form of expression available to poverty.

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.

She had developed a number of habits in her younger years, none of which carried with them a bright future, and the things she would offer to do for a couple of dollars would make the Devil blush.

And every historic effort to forge a democratic project has been undermined by two fundamental realities: poverty and paranoia. The persistence of poverty generates levels of despair that deepen social conflict the escalation of paranoia produces levels of distrust that reinforce cultural division. Rae is the most explosive issue in American life precisely because it forces us to confront the tragic facts of poverty and paranoia despair, and distrust. In short, a candid examination of race matters takes us to the core of the crisis of American democracy (p. 107).

For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying 'lepers' we would understand 'outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.' But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign.

Childhood, after all, is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child.

By defining the problem as "hunger," the emergency food system is helping to direct our attention away from the more fundamental problem of poverty, and the even more basic problem of inequality.

Free yourself from mental slavery. Break those invisible chains your masters put on your spiritual neck to control you

Like navigation markings in unknown waters, definitions of poverty need to be distinctive and unambiguous. A definition that is not precise is as bad as no definition at all.

Recent evidence confirms that retail prices of essential consumer goods in poor countries are not appreciably lower than in the United States or Western Europe. In fact, with deregulation and "free trade", the cost of living in many Third World cities is now higher than in the United States. My experience in Latin America and Haiti is that the prices of meat, fish and fresh vegetables are about the same as in the United States. Can you imagine eating on less than one dollar a day?

Without an informed electorate, politicians will continue to use the bottom billion merely for photo opportunities, rather than promoting real transformation.

As usual, in every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.

The tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self denial.

In rural and struggling Lexington, Virginia, Lee's new postwar home, one writer joked darkly dollars were so scarce that they had to be introduced to one another when they met on Main Street.

Poverty is not intrinsically a trap, otherwise we would all still be poor.