Poverty Quotes - Page 34

• The bottom half of humanity is living in severe poverty; not all of them are malnourished or severely deprived now, but they are extremely vulnerable to even small upsets in their income or in the prices they face of basic necessities, and when something like this happens, they can be thrown off kilter in terms of a disease of a family member or a change in food prices; anything like that can throw them into destitution.

  Thomas Pogge

  Upset, Humanity, Income

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• The bottom quarter of the human population has only three-quarters of one percent of global household income, about one thirty-second of the average income in the world, whereas the people in the top five percent have nine times the average income. So the ratio between the averages in the top five percent and the bottom quarter is somewhere around 300 to one - a huge inequality that also gives you a sense of how easily poverty could be avoided.

  Thomas Pogge

  Average, People, Giving

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Given the total income and wealth available in the world today, we could easily overcome poverty, which would require raising the share of the bottom half from three to roughly five percent. Unfortunately, the trend is going in the opposite direction.

  Thomas Pogge

  Opposites, Overcoming, Income

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Poverty persists, essentially, because the people at the bottom - the bottom quarter and also the bottom half - see the gains from the rising global average income wiped out by severe declines in their relative share.

  Thomas Pogge

  Average, People, Income

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I see a violation of human rights not in the mere fact that people don't have enough to eat and that they are very vulnerable, but I see it in the fact that the economic institutional order of the world is associated with this very persistent poverty and that different institutional arrangements at the supranational level could stop and even reverse the slide towards ever-greater income disparities.

  Thomas Pogge

  Rights, Order, People

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• The collective shortfall of the 3.08 billion people (47 percent of world population) who, in 2005, lived below $2.50 per day was $507 billion per annum, which indeed comes to about two-thirds of the present US military budget. This gives us a rough sense of how much the eradication of poverty would cost.

  Thomas Pogge

  Military, Two, People

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• We should not think of poverty eradication as a matter of collecting money and giving it to the poor so much as of reforming the global rules that are disadvantaging the poor and making it impossible for them to fend for themselves.

  Thomas Pogge

  Thinking, Giving, Matter

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• We should condemn as unjust a global economic order that leads to ever-increasing economic disparities - provided this effect is foreseeable and provided it is also avoidable through some alternative institutional design that would foreseeably lead to much less poverty and inequality. Those involved in designing or imposing the existing rules are collectively responsible for the resulting excess deprivations and human rights deficits.

  Thomas Pogge

  Rights, Order, Design

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• The World Bank is the monopoly provider of poverty data and, partly due to a leadership change there, the World Bank's reporting has been heavily on the rosy side since about 2000. The Bank's cultivation of an upbeat picture affords a very interesting lesson in statistics and how you can, depending on which numbers you present and how you present them, create a more positive or more negative impression of the evolution of poverty.

  Thomas Pogge

  Data, Numbers, Interesting

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• To make a proper moral appraisal of the prevalence of severe poverty today, we should focus not on comparisons with times past, when the global average income was much lower, but on a comparison with what would be possible in our time, given the current global average income and level of technological and administrative development.

  Thomas Pogge

  Past, Average, Focus

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Severe poverty is getting better by some measures, but it's also becoming ever more scandalous because it is now so easily avoidable.

  Thomas Pogge

  Get Better, Becoming, Scandalous

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• A few hundred years ago, perhaps 85 or even 90 percent of humanity lived below a standard of living that today only 40 or 45 percent fail to reach. But at that earlier time only part of this poverty could have been eradicated, and this at substantial cost not only to the pleasures of the affluent, but also to their well-being and to human culture. In our time, nearly all severe poverty could be eradicated at a cost to the affluent that is truly trivial.

  Thomas Pogge

  Years, Humanity, Culture

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• It is perfectly consistent - and also true - to say that the world poverty problem today is smaller (relative to world population) than before and yet also a much graver injustice.

  Thomas Pogge

  Population, World, Today

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• We have the ability now to arrange global economic institutions so that poverty declines to a fraction of what it is now.

  Thomas Pogge

  Economic, Decline, Institutions

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Expectations are usually predicated on the idea that the everyday things that happen to ordinary people shouldn't happen to you. People hold the idea of being ordinary in absolute contempt, so when they face an illness, poverty, or any kind of catastrophe, they say, "I can't believe this happened to me." And who did you think it was going to happen to - the woman across the street? It makes them think, "I must be on the wrong path." But what if something you thought was bad was the best thing that ever happened to you? What if that was part of your path?

  Caroline Myss

  Believe, Thinking, Ideas

  Source: www.oprah.com

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• One of the major causes of poverty is a lack of family planning. Governments and nonprofit organizations need to encourage poor people to use birth control so that they don't have unexpected babies, which will only make poorer families poorer.

  Philip Kotler

  Baby, Government, Organization

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• When you look at what [new generation] believe in, how they value diversity, how they believe in science, how they care about the environment, how they believe in, you know, everybody getting a fair shot, how they believe in not discriminating against people for sexual orientation and you know, their belief that we have to work with other countries to create a more peaceful world and to alleviate poverty, that's the majority an entire generation that's coming up behind us.

  Barack Obama

  Country, Believe, Diversity

  Source: abcnews.go.com

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• When I got the women's marathon into the Olympics and we had races all over the world I thought, 'That's great, now we're heading towards total equality.' Then you see that there are women who are still not allowed to drive, get an education, or travel unless they have a male companion or can't carry their passport. There are those who are mired with incredible poverty in North Africa, the mid-east, South East Asia and there's a ridiculous amount of human trafficking.

  Kathrine Switzer

  Race, World, Olympics

  Source: runningmagazine.ca

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• The image of blacks usually is one of people who are suffering from hunger, unemployment, and poverty. The idea of them as agents and activists - as starting revolutions - does not exist in most people's minds. And I think it's very, very important that folks understand how much America was founded on the enslavement of blacks, and how the resistance of blacks to that enslavement has been the spark plug for so many important developments.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Thinking, Ideas, America

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Depending on where you live, your threat is much different from the other person. If you ask a New Yorker today, because of the way the press plays it, he will say terrorism is his biggest fear. But for somebody living on a small island state, then it is climate change, the rise of the sea level, for his whole island may be washed away. If I go to southern Africa, they tell me it is HIV/AIDS and somewhere in Asia it is poverty. This is also why you will find it difficult to find agreements, because if you want someone to be concerned about your threat, then you should be concerned about his.

  Kofi Annan

  Agreement, Sea, Play

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• I think America the symbol and America the notion are still very different from America the nation. What's touching and almost regenerative is that whatever is happening in the reality of America, where there is a murder rate worse than Lebanon's and where there is so much homelessness and poverty, still America will be a shorthand throughout the world for everything that is young and modern and free.

  Pico Iyer

  Reality, Thinking, America

  Source: scottlondon.com

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• Even in the era of the first black president, racism is still the most intractable issue in USA. Regarding poverty, half of all Americans are either in or near poverty. Poverty is certainly worse for African-Americans now than it was during King's lifetime.

  Tavis Smiley

  Kings, Issues, Usa

  "Tavis Smiley on repositioning Dr. King as a revolutionary". Interview With Kam Williams, baystatebanner.com. December 11, 2014.

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• The things I really cared about - poverty, the Great Society, civil rights - were all being drained away by the Vietnam War. The line that keeps running through my mind is the line I never spoke: "I can't speak for a war that I believe is immoral."

  Bill Moyers

  Running, War, Believe

  Source: progressive.org

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• Anyone who lives with poor health or chronic pain, or who has endured poverty - real poverty - knows what it is to live with lack and a resulting fear so incessant that it becomes thoroughly normalized, invisible in its ubiquity. If you're lucky enough to have that fear begin to ease, it's an odd experience. A stranglehold eases off your entire body, one you never fully realized was there.

  C.E. Morgan

  Pain, Real, Ubiquity

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• Martin Luther King was bumped off unjustly, Adam Clayton Powell was bumped off unjustly, they took my title unjustly, they killed Megers Ever unjustly, all the integrators who love white folks, was unjustly kicked out of Washington, they've been deprived of education and poverty throughout the country.

  Muhammad Ali

  Country, Kings, White

  Source: thefederalist.com

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