Paul Krugman Quotes

Poverty can teach lessons that privilege cannot.

I'm not by nature a cynical person. But sometimes your expectations are different from reality.

Whatever people's backgrounds or values, a society where more and more people face a daily struggle to house, clothe and even feed themselves and their families cannot possibly be the answer.

Poverty is unnecessary.

Nobody is poor unless he stand in need of justice.

I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people.

My own experience in the third world was that even if people started to make more money, the cost of living and housing increased often faster than the wages.

Poverty affects people of all races.

The 1 to 2 billion poorest in the world, who don't have food for the day, suffer from the worst disease: globalization deficiency. The way globalization is occurring could be much better, but the worst thing is not being part of it. For those people, we need to support good civil societies and governments.

Sub-Saharan Africa is also home to 400 million of the world's poorest people.

If you look at the human condition today, not everyone is well fed, has access to good medical care, or the physical basics that provide for a healthy and a happy life.

It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.

Sometimes I listen to songs by very smart writers who assume that the world is a civil place with certain formalities that people follow, but I don't see things that way. My own experience tells me that life is not like that.

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

Yes, disappointment over perceived unfairness, injustice, promises not kept, tends to go hand in hand with increasing prosperity. Expectations are dashed. What can I say!

The fundamental evil of the world arose from the fact that the good Lord has not created money enough.

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

For every talent that poverty has stimulated, it has blighted a hundred.

To ruin those who possess something is not to come to the aid of those who possess nothing; it is only to render misery general.

Bottom 10 Percent progressives are not enthusiastic about concentrations of wealth. But that's not what keeps them up at night. Their focus is on deprivation and lack of opportunity. They're motivated by empathy for people who are suffering, rather than outrage over unjustified wealth.

Poverty wastes people; it wastes opportunity.

While we have created prosperity for many, too many are being left behind.

I assure you that the world is not so amusing as we imagined.

It's not fair," I said. "It's just so goddamned unfair." "The world," he said, "is not a wishgranting factory.

Certainly I'll never be able to put myself in the situation that people growing up in the less developed countries are in. I've gotten a bit of a sense of it by being out there and meeting people and talking with them.