#poverty

The more you have, the more you are occupied, the less you give. But the less you have the more free you are. Poverty for us is a freedom. It is not mortification, a penance. It is joyful freedom. There is no television here, no this, no that. But we are perfectly happy. ↗

— Mother Teresa

#love #poverty #freedom

Before I was married, I thought the sound of bangles jangling on my forearms would be delightful. I looked forward to being able to wear bells around my ankles and silver necklaces around my neck, but not any more, not since I had learned what they represented for the man who gave them. A necklace was no prettier than a piece of of rope that ties a goat to a tree, depriving it of freedom. ↗

— Phoolan Devi

#freedom #hardship #india #necklace #poverty

It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. ↗

— George Orwell

#fear-of-the-future #inequality #poverty #society #imagination

In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had- A Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up it's feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves. ↗

— Barbara Kingsolver

#happiness #poverty #imagination

You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace. ↗

— Frank McCourt

#mind #poverty #intelligence

Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity and to walk toward a civilization which will be free and intelligent; which will be healthy and unafraid, and build in the world a culture led by black folk and joined by peoples of all colors and all races - without poverty, ignorance and disease! ↗

— W.E.B. Du Bois

#devotion #disease #poverty #youth #intelligence

MT [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#empowerment-of-women #mother-teresa #poverty #poverty-alleviation #life

Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness. ↗

— Peter Singer

#life

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools. ↗

— J. K. Rowling

#depression #efforts #entails #fear #fools

We have to examine the extent to which we export poverty to other societies. When we decide that we will import products from China that are produced by people earning less than a dollar an hour, and grant their country most-favored-nation status (political contributions notwithstanding), we are deciding to make American workers who must earn the minimum wage compete with them. I am not suggesting that we close the doors to China or to Mexico, but I am suggesting that we look very carefully at the web of international relationships that we are creating. At the very minimum, we should understand that we have two choices in our country: we can raise world living standards by exporting those standards, or we can lower living standards- not only the world’s but also our own- by deciding that it is acceptable for the products of exploited labor to enter this country. ↗

— Julianne Malveaux

#poverty #quality-of-life #work #life