Marco Rubio Quotes

The great mass of the poor in countries are become an hereditary race, and it is next to impossible them to get out of that state of themselves

If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources. We lack something else.

The second truism that we must understand is that poverty does not create our social problems, our social problems create our poverty.

There is another world out there, the existence of which the Court, I suspect, either chooses to ignore or fears to recognize. And so the cancer of poverty will continue to grow.

The association of poverty with progress is the enigma of our times.

Poverty causes crime.

Problems of persistent poverty cannot be addressed unless they are acknowledged.

If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice.

I can't help but react to the painful realities of the two-tiered society we live in, where the signs of poverty and inequity are everywhere. Almost twenty five percent of our children live at or below the poverty line. We expect the no-option life cycle of the poor to be interrupted by the weak social safety net and then wonder why building more jails doesn't solve the problems.

You have to be interested in inequality. The issue of inequality and that of poverty are not separable.

Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.

Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soulless army of human prey.

Poverty and pride are devoted blood brothers until one, always and inevitably, kills the other.

Poverty is the fundamental cause of most of the physical, moral and economic ills of humanity.

When I was asked: "Will shame do it?" Meaning: Will welfare people be shamed into getting respectable work? And I said that shame plays the biggest role there is: The biggest shame is that there is so much abundance around but that so many have so little and so few have so much. That's the shame.

The poor and ignorant will continue to lie and steal as long as the rich and educated show them how.

When I find too many puzzles about the way explanations are given about why there is inequality - why people who work the hardest in the world end up being the poorest - I can't just sit back and not try to understand why the gaps between people are increasing, or why there are so many homeless and hungry people in the world.

To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.

[President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy.

There is a common tendency to ignore the poor or to develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate.

Those who know the normal life of the poor... will realize well enough that without economic security, liberty is not worth having.

Poverty is the openmouthed relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society. And it is hell enough.

But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution.

It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.