Poverty Awareness Quotes

Ensnared in his starvation, Chaplin-man is always just below political awareness. A strike is a catastrophe for him because it threatens a man truly blinded by his hunger; this man achieves an awareness of the working-class condition only when the poor man and the proletarian coincide under the gaze (and the blows) of the police.

The last thing the theatre owners wanted was for people who spent $200 to see 'Les Miserables' to come out again and see the real miserable children of America, right there on the sidewalk.

poverty is like a pain, dormant and unbearable as long as you don't move about too much. You grow used to it, you end up by paying no attention to it. But once you presume to bring it out in the daylight, it becomes terrifying, you see it at last in all its squalor and you shrink from exposing it to the sun.

It wasn't until sixth grade, at P.S. 168, when my teacher took us on a field trip to her house that I realized we were poor. I have no idea what my teacher's intentions were - whether she was trying to inspire us or if she actually thought visiting her Manhattan brownstone with her view of Central Park qualified as a school trip.

There are people much less fortunate than us, and I don't mean people hungry sleeping in the streets either.

I cannot imagine anything nobler or more national than that for, say, one hour in the day we should all do the labor the poor must do, and thus identify ourselves with them and through them, with all mankind.

I think that before people were speaking much about the poor, but now more and more people are speaking to the poor. That is the great difference.

I feel it's part of my job to make the problems of the poor compelling.

I was shocked when I came to New Orleans. I never knew there were beggars on the streets here. I didn't know that there were poor people. I thought this was Heaven, you know?

My friends in Kennington always ask me, 'can I have a shirt for my little brother or cousin,' and I always send them shirts. I will never forget where I have come from, because I know what it is like growing up in that area, and it is not nice.

Half the world does not know how the other half lives.

I saw all the moral decay you could, beginning at 2 years old. But I also got to see how the other half lived.

It's really important to be attentive to the people who have less - who are less fortunate than you are.

I often think what it was like not to have much money. I don't think it's good for people to be born into money and not know what it is never to have it.

Even when I got ₹500 a month as pocket money, I would never spend all of it. It's the same now. I am just conscious of the fact that I wasn't born with a silver spoon.

The big majority of Americans, who are comparatively well-off, have developed an ability to have enclaves of people living in the greatest misery almost without noticing them.

I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

We are in the middle of a world revolution, and I don't mean Communism. The revolution I'm talking about is that of the little, poor people all over the world. They're beginning to learn what there is in life, and to learn what they are missing.

People don't need to become more aware of poverty - they need to know how to end it.

The issue I focus on the most is extreme poverty. I think it's kind of out of sight out of mind. I wish there would be more stories about that to connect people to what's happening. To personalize it, to make it real to people, to inspire them to action.

When we got back to the U.S., I wanted to kiss the ground after seeing what people in other countries are denied or don't have.

The "discovery" of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the "discovery" of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.

Only by becoming poor ourselves, by stripping away our complacency, will we be able to identify with the least of our brothers and sisters.

I backpacked around the world and went to places like Mexico City and Pakistan, where I'm like, 'Oh. Things aren't quite as good.'

There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.