#pov

I died last night. Seventy years too young. ↗

— Colin Thompson

#early-death #famine #global #ignorance #niger

Economists are coming to acknowledge that measures of national wealth and poverty in terms strictly of average income tell you little that is significant of the health or viability of a society. ↗

— Rowan D. Williams

#average #coming #economists #health #income

So why is a third of our world battling obesity and spending huge sums to burn off excess calories, while the other two-thirds yearn to get more of them? ↗

— Wess Stafford

#diet #excercise #hunger #obesity #poverty

When a destitute mother starts earning an income, her dreams of success invariably center around her children. A woman's second priority is the household. She wants to buy utensils, build a stronger roof, or find a bed for herself and her family. A man has an entirely different set of priorities. When a destitute father earns extra income, he focuses more attention on himself. Thus money entering a household through a woman brings more benefits to the family as a whole. ↗

— Muhammad Yunus

#poverty #dreams

Royce Westmoreland stared at him with biting scorn. "I despise hypocrisy, particularly when it is coated with holiness." "May I ask for a specific example?" "Fat priests," Royce replied, "with fat purses, who lecture staving peasants on the dangers of gluttony and the merits of poverty. ↗

— Judith McNaught

#hypocrisy #poverty #dreams

God's Word teaches a very hard, disturbing truth. Those who neglect the poor and the oppressed are really not God's people at all—no matter how frequently they practice their religious rituals nor how orthodox are their creeds and confessions. ↗

— Ronald J. Sider

#confession #creeds #god-s-word #neglect #oppression

There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an inner-city child only eight years old "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years before. ↗

— Jonathan Kozol

#education #government #poverty #standardized-tests #education

Research experts want to know what can be done about the values of poor segregated children; and this is a question that needs asking. But they do not ask what can be done about the values of the people who have segregated these communities. There is no academic study of the pathological detachment of the very rich... ↗

— Jonathan Kozol

#poverty-wealth #school-reform #segregation #education

Welcome to Hartford. The poorest city in the wealthiest state in the richest country on earth. ↗

— Susan Eaton

#poverty #school-reform #education

It required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favorite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy. ↗

— Thornton Wilder

#insensitivity #poverty #education