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“Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed. ”
― Dorothy Day

“Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich

“What if we ceased to pledge our allegiance to the bottom line and stood, instead, with those who line the bottom?”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Truly, I've learned more theology living in poor neighborhoods than in classrooms. At times I wonder if the questions of traditional theology have any meaning for the poor. And "the poor" here mean eighty percent of the population! (Ivone Gebara, p. 209)”
― Mev Puleo, The Struggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation

“Politics is a game played by the rich with the lives of the poor.”
― J.Adam Snyder

“And the priests looked down into the pit of injustice and they turned their faces away and said, 'Our kingdom is not as the kingdom of this world. Our life on earth is but a pilgrimage. The soul lives on humility and patience,' at the same time screwing the poor from their last centime. They settled down among their treasures and ate and drank with princes and to the starving they said, 'Suffer. Suffer as he suffered on the cross for it is the will of God.'

And anyone believes what they hear over and over again, so the poor instead of bread made do with a picture of the bleeding, scourged, and nailed-up Christ and prayed to that image of their helplessness. And the priests said, 'Raise your hands to heaven and bend your knees and bear your suffering without complaint. Pray for those that torture you, for prayer and blessing are the only stairways which you can climb to paradise.'

And so they chained down the poor in their ignorance so that they wouldn't stand up and fight their bosses who ruled in the name of the lie of divine right.”
― Peter Weiss, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade

“Go to the poor, be the poor. Go to the people, be the people.”
― Russian nihilist proverb

“Theology alone doesn't convine anyone.
Only those words which are pregnant with action, theology that is born of suffering, of struggles, of the poor--this theology is a testimony. This theology leads to conversion. (Leonardo Boff, p. 169)”
― Mev Puleo, The Struggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation

“You put yourself in a tight corner of failure if you think "it's only the rich that get richer while the poor get poorer". No! Something good can come out from you no matter who you are, what you have done and where you have been to!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“Every time the rich ignore the poor, the rich become poorer! Poorest is the person who has all the means to help others but chooses not to!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Ils y doivent travailler devant la majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues, et de voler du pain.”
― Anatole France, Le Lys rouge suivi de Le Jardin d'Épicure

“Money is not the root of all evil. Poverty of the mind is.”
― John Joclebs Bassey, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog’s-eared creeds, the poor you will have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you.”
― Charles Dickens, Hard Times

“Even the poorest among us deserves the dignity of equality.”
― The Prophet of Life

“The next day I was driven down to New York City to take the physical. It was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen. Several hundred young men, maybe even a thousand, in their skivvies, walking around an enormous room, all of us lost, dazed, and confused.
Some of these guys had dodged the draft and were there under the watchful eyes of dozens of federal marshals lined up against one of the walls. After eight hours of being poked, prodded, stuck, and poked again, I was given a large red envelope. I had been rejected. I had the respiratory problems of an old man, high blood pressure, partial loss of hearing, very bad teeth, very flat, very wide feet and I tested positive for tuberculosis.
“Frankly,â€� the doctor said, “I don’t know how the hell you’re even standing up,â€� and that was when the sergeant told me that if they bottled everything that was wrong with me “we could take over the world without a shot.”
― John William Tuohy, No Time to Say Goodbye: A Memoir of a Life in Foster Care

“It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close and stale. Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick and mortar echoes hideous. Melancholy streets in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows, in a dire despondency. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round. Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish relief to an overworked people. No pictures, no unfamiliar animal, no rare plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient world - all taboo with that enlightened strictness, that the ugly South sea gods in the British Museum might have supposed themselves at home again. Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to change the brooding mind, or raise it up. Nothing for the spent toiler to do, but to compare the monotony of his seventh day with the monotony of his six days, think what a weary life he led, and make the best of it - or the worst, according to the probabilities.”
― Charles Dickens

“At a distance, we see a need and ignore it. We judge it, condemn it, forget it. We don't think about it, because if we practice ignorance long enough, we don't notice the need anymore. It goes underground, and we're content with the surface of life as we know it - unwilling to break deeper ground. If all appears to be well on the outside, that is good enough for our consciences.

...If we are willing to dig deep, to find Calcutta in our own backyards, we will find the poor. But we will also find God. And He may just open our eyes, so that we can see the need and not soon forget. So that we can hear their cries and not grow deaf. So that we can smell the stench of human need and awaken our hearts to compassion.”
― Jeff Goins, Wrecked: When a Broken World Slams into your Comfortable Life

“A pair of peasants must be saved even if we build an ark.”
― Christina Rossetti

“The stunning problem with mindset is sometimes the rich are cheap while the poor are expensive.”
― Martin Uzochukwu Ugwu

“All sufferers can find comfort in the solidarity of the Crucified; but only those who struggle against evil by following the example of the Crucified will discover Him at their side. To claim the comfort of the Crucified while rejecting His way is to advocate not only cheap grace but a deceitful ideology. Within the overarching theme of self-donation the theme of solidarity must be fully affirmed, for it underlines rightly the partiality of divine compassion towards the ‘harassed and helplessâ€�.”
― Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation

“Nowadays there really is no primary poverty left in this country. In Western countries we are left with the problems which aren't poverty. All right, there may be poverty because people don't know how to budget, don't know how to spend their earnings, but now you are left with the really hard fundamental character—personality defect.”
― Margaret Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher In Her Own Words

“Humanity has eyes that are sharp enough to see the poor who collect garbage from the dumps, but humanity does not have enough heart to help them!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Most economists oppose minimum wage laws, but that never prevents the laws from being written. The living wage movement lives on, not because of any merit, but because it's a popular political move to back anything that "helps the poor.”
― Ben Shapiro, Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth

“Of course I’d step on the weak. Would I step on the strong? Of course I would take from the weakâ€� would I take from the strong? In this world, the weak are always trampled by the strong. Both in the past millennium and the millennium to come, the strong will take from the weak. The only truth in this world is that the strong will take possession of the weak! The strong... will stomp all over and take from the weak! This is the truth that will never change!”
― Gil Taemi, Six Flying Dragons (2015)

“If our prayers for others mean anything at all, they cannot be cloistered away all the time in sanitised environments. Standing in the gap for the oppressed may well mean that it matters where we pray and how we pray, and that our prayers for the poor are worked out very practically.”
― Pete Greig, Red Moon Rising: How 24-7 Prayer Is Awakening a Generation

“We need a global conversation because the Bible itself is global. God's Word has never been the exclusive property of the elite. God's Word is for the world. If anything, the Bible gives priority to the weak, the oppressed, and the poor and is tougher on privileged people who hold the reins of wealth and power but refuse to wield their advantages for the good of others.”
― Carolyn Custis James, Half the Church: Recapturing God's Global Vision for Women

“If you were not born with a silver spoon, take any spoon, and coat it with silver.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“The poor cannot fast, because he cannot abstain from the food he cannot afford.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“The rich hear about starvation.
The poor can write a novel about it.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“I view America as a very different country to what I did when I first arrived. Today I view it as a country of extreme poverty.”
― Steven Magee