Quotes about Poverty

Holy poverty confounds cupidity and avarice and the cares of this world.

Poverty wants some, luxury many, and avarice all things.

So much talent comes from the base of poverty and those in the margins. You limit the base, you miss too much talent.

These days there is a lot of poverty in the world, and that's a scandal when we have so many riches and resources to give to everyone. We all have to think about how we can become a little poorer.

The life of the community, both domestically and internationally, clearly demonstrates that respect for rights, and the guarantees that follow from them, are measures of the common good that serve to evaluate the relationship between justice and injustice, development and poverty, security and conflict.

To help the poor to a capacity for action and liberty is something essential for one's own health as well as theirs: there is a needful gift they have to offer which cannot be offered so long as they are confined by poverty.

Churches know more about poverty than any government will ever know, because we're dealing with the poor every day.

A majority, perhaps as many as 75 percent, of abortion clinics are in areas with high minority populations. Abortion apologists will say this is because they want to serve the poor. You don't serve the poor, however, by taking their money to terminate their children.

There are none so impoverished as those who deny the blessings of their lives.

What's disturbing, then, is when people talk more about hell after this life than they do about hell here and now. As a Christian I want to do what I can to resist hell coming to earth: poverty, injustice, suffering--they're all hells on earth and as Christians we oppose them with all of our energies.

I read more of the prophets, these poets and sages who spoke all kinds of truth to power. Another of the ways they explained why they'd been taken into exile was because there was a widening gap between rich and poor in their society, and whenever that happens, the entire system is in danger of imploding. Again and again prophets like Amos announce that if more and more wealth ends up in fewer and fewer hands everybody will suffer. How had I missed this?

What we see in Jesus's story about the rich man and Lazarus is an affirmation that there are all kinds of hells, because there are all kinds of ways to resist and reject all that is good and true and beautiful and human now, in this life, and so we can only assume we can do the same in the next.