Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgement at how they carry it.
Greg Boyle SJ
History will judge societies and governments and their institutions not by how big they are or how well they serve the rich and powerful but how effectively they respond to the needs of the poor and the helpless.
Cesar Chavez
Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.
Aristotle
That coat that hangs in your closet belongs to the poor.
Peter Maurin
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
Bishop Helder Camara
We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.
Dorothy Day
The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
Dorothy Day
I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor.
Dorothy Day
I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.
Dorothy Day
Poverty is not a fate; it is a condition. It is not a misfortune; it is an injustice.
Gustavo Gutierrez OP
Poverty is not an accident. Like slavery and apartheid, it is man-made and can be removed by the actions of human beings.
Nelson Mandela
Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity, it is an act of justice.
Nelson Mandela
What we give to the poor for Christ’s sake is what we carry with us when we die.
Peter Maurin
Poverty is the worst form of violence.
Mohandas Gandhi
Recall the face of the poorest and most helpless person you have seen and ask yourself if the next step you contemplate is going to be of any use to that person.
Mohandas Gandhi
The rich must live more simply so that the poor may simply live.
Mohandas Gandhi
By seeing the problem of poverty merely in terms of assistance, we overlook that our enormous economic advantage is deeply tainted by how accumulated over the course of one historical process that has devastated the societies and cultures of four continents.
Tom Pogge
The stunning thing about the world as it is, is that we have a tremendously large problem in it: namely, one-third of all human deaths, 80 million every year from poverty-related causes, trivial diseases and so on, and stunningly, nobody is really paying attention to it.
Tom Pogge
The core of liberation theology is profoundly ‘theological’ – that is, rooted in the very nature of God. There is an intimate relationship between God, oppression and liberation: God is in the poor who cry out, and God is in the one who listens to the cry and liberates, so that the poor no longer need to cry out.
Mev Puelo
In this ‘civilization of poverty,’ may the poor be our sisters and brothers.
Jon Sobrino
The media seems to think only abortion and gay marriage are religious issues. Poverty is a moral issue, it is a faith issue, it’s a religious issue.
Jim Wallis
The world will not change until we do.
Jim Wallis
We have some mountains to move. Three billion people – half of God’s children are living on less than $2.00 a day.
Jim Wallis
Poverty is not created by poor people. It is created by the system we have built, the institutions we have designed the policies & laws we created.
Mohammad Yunus
I believe that we can create a poverty-free world because poverty is not created by poor people. It has been created and sustained by the economic and social systems that we have designed for ourselves; the institutions and concepts that make up that system; the policies that we pursue.
Mohammad Yunus
Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society.
Mohammad Yunus
Poor people are like bonsai trees. There’s nothing wrong with their genes, only the society, the system, never lets them grow.
Mohammad Yunus
We can remove poverty from the surface of the earth only if we can redesign our institutions – like the banking institutions, and other institutions; if we redesign our policies, if we look back on our concepts, so that we have a different idea of poor people.
Mohammad Yunus
People.. were poor not because they were stupid or lazy. They worked all day long, doing complex physical tasks. They were poor because the financial institution in the country did not help them widen their economic base.
Mohammad Yunus
A basic principle of modern state capitalism is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized.
Noam Chomsky
In the Bible, poverty is a scandalous condition inimical to human dignity and therefore contrary to the will of God.
Gustavo Gutierrez OP
An essential clue to the understanding of poverty in liberation theology is the distinction made in the Medellin document ‘Poverty of the Church,’ between three meanings of the term ‘poverty’: real poverty as an evil – that is something that God does not want; spiritual poverty, in the sense of a readiness to do God’s will; and solidarity with the poor along with protest against the conditions under which they suffer.
Gustavo Gutierrez OP
Any city–however small–is, in fact, divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.
Plato
The denunciation of injustice implies the rejection of the use of Christianity to legitimize the established order.
Gustavo Gutierrez OP