Poverty Experience Quotes

There's a big difference between wanting to work and having to work. And I had to learn that the hard way. Now money is very important to me, because I ain't got it.

I'm not a fool with my money. I've known what it's like to be poor and I don't splash it around stupidly.

I've been rich; I've been poor. I've been successful; I've been decimated. And the way I felt inside didn't change dramatically. It's less stressful to have money, that's for sure. But that doesn't mean I felt fulfilled. So I've learned to live in the smaller moments of life.

When I was 12, my mum put us in a summer camp meant for children from low-income families. It was in upstate New York where we had to live in tents, fetch water, cook our meals, and even dig our own toilet bowls.

I grew up in Chillum Heights in the Washington, D.C. area., and it was never a garden spot. When guys go, 'Hey, when I grew up, my neighborhood was tough, and it was this and that'... the reality is that it was just a terribly sad place. And thank God, I was able to escape it.

Poverty is a lot like childbirth - you know it is going to hurt before it happens, but you'll never know how much until you experience it.

Poverty is more than a material experience; it's a psychological state as well, one that is infused with anxiety. And decision-making is very complex because every decision you make has an impact on your future and survival.

I wasn't born into money and there have been jobs in the past that I've not wanted to take on, but I've had to because of the money.

I've never experienced chronic poverty, but I know what it's like to live on £3 a week.

When I was very small, the electricity was turned off because we didn't pay the bill. I remember sitting by the oil lamp listening to my mother playing 'Careless Love' on the piano.

But most distinctly, I remember always saying to myself that when I get big, I'm not going to go to bed hungry, I'm not going to wear hand-me-down clothes.

Child poverty is more than an abstract problem to me. It's something I know all too much about.

I saw certain things that I think maybe other kids are protected from. Like, I saw my parents struggling. I knew that we were cutting out coupons and buying dented cans because they were cheaper. And all our furniture was from the garbage. It was just - and to me because I was a kid, all that stuff was really exciting.

I have lived poverty. I didn't choose it. No one would choose humiliation, pain, and rage.

People with a culture of poverty suffer much less from repression than we of the middle class suffer and indeed, if I may make the suggestion with due qualification, they often have a hell of a lot more fun than we have.

I remember crying all the time. My major thing growing up was I couldn't fit in. Because I was from everywhere, I didn't have no buddies that I grew up with...Every time I had to go to a new apartment, I had to reinvent myself, myself. People think just because you born in the ghetto you gonna fit in. A little twist in your life and you don't fit in no matter what. If they push you out of the hood and the White people's world, that's criminal...Hell, I felt like my could be destroyed at any moment.

We never considered Christmas a holiday because the budget was really tight, so Christmas was just a usual day for us.

I kind of wanted to be a waitress in New York City. I thought it was fun and glamorous in its own way. Like in the movie 'Beaches,' when Bette Midler is banging on the radiator, and it's cold, and she's poor. I kind of thought that would be fun to be, like, a poor, struggling actor.

To live in poverty is to live with constant uncertainty, to accept galling indignities, and to expect harassment by the police, welfare officials and employers, as well as by others who are poor and desperate.

I went to school four years later than most people because I was a teen father, hustled on the streets, worked, lived on welfare and the like, and didn't get to college until almost 21. That's when I officially got licensed and ordained, right after that.

There was an undercurrent of poverty throughout my childhood. We lived with my grandmother in her two-bedroom flat, and I slept with my parents. We had cheap holidays, I had to save for my bike and get a paper round as soon as I was old enough.

In the Dominican Republic, my mom and I lived in this little tiny town called Cabarete, which is very poor.

I grew up in different orphanages in Israel, and if they gave me a pair of shoes, a shirt, and pair of pants every year, I was lucky. The rest was handouts, leftover clothes. So I appreciated clothes because I only had one new shirt each year.

I lived below the official American poverty line until I was 31.

I've worked with and talked to poor people my entire life, being in the pawn shop business.