poverty

No doubt we instinctively prefer to help those who are close to us. Few could stand by and watch a child drown; many can ignore the avoidable deaths of children in Africa or India. The question, however, is not what we usually do, but what we ought to do, and it is difficult to see any sound moral justification for the view that distance, or community membership, makes a crucial difference to our obligations.

Charity had always slightly creeped me out: There was nothing quite as condescending as the phrase "helping the less fortunate" rolling off the tongue of a white professional, as if poverty were a matter of luck instead of the result of a political system.

Poverty would always exist when we allow injustices to speak.

She__ a lean vixen: I can seethe ribs, the slytrickster__ eyes, filled with longing and desperation, the skinnyfeet, adept at lies.Why encourage the notionof virtuous poverty?It__ only an excusefor zero charity.Hunger corrupts, and absolute hungercorrupts absolutely,

Eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.

But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality. Because black men were disproportionately incarcerated and black women disproportionately evicted, uniformly denying housing to applicants with recent criminal or eviction records still had an incommensurate impact on African Americans.

It was not that low-income renters didn__ know their rights. They just knew those rights would cost them.

We are well,' Efuru replied. 'It is only hunger.''It is good that it is only hunger. Good health is what we pray for.

Poor black families were __mmersed in a domestic web of a large number of kin and friends whom they [could] count on,_ wrote the anthropologist Carol Stack in All Our Kin. Those entwined in such a web swapped goods and services on a daily basis. This did little to lift families out of poverty, but it was enough to keep them afloat. But large-scale social transformations__he crack epidemic, the rise of the black middle class, and the prison boom among them__ad frayed the family safety net in poor communities. So had state policies like Aid to Families with Dependent Children that sought to limit __in dependence_ by giving mothers who lived alone or with unrelated roommates a larger stipend than those who lived with relatives.

Today, the majority of poor renting families in America spend over half of their income on housing, and at least one in four dedicates over 70 percent to paying the rent and keeping the lights on.

It is quite wrong to assume that poor people are generally unwilling to change; but the proposed change must stand in some organic relationship to what they are doing already, and they are rightly suspicious of, and resistant to, radical changes proposed by town-based and office-bound innovators who approach them in the spirit of: "You just get out of my way and I shall show you how useless you are and how splendidly the job can be done with a lot of foreign money and outlandish equipment.

it is hard to argue that housing is not a fundamental human need. Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country. The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.

You may proclaim, good sirs, your fine philosophy, but till you feed us right and wrong can wait. Or is it only those who have the money who can enter the land of milk and honey?

When you have no choice, you have no discontent either.

Then he said the funny thing was the old man himself had left home when he was a kid, after a fight with his own father. The father lit into him for using the wheelbarrow."It was this way. They always carried the feed to the horses, pail by pail. In the winter, when the horses were in the stalls. So my father took the notion to carry it to them in the wheelbarrow. Naturally it was a lot quicker. But he got beat. For laziness. That was the way they were, you know. Any change of any kind was a bad thing. Efficiency was just laziness, to them. That's the peasant thinking for you.

The difference between poverty and prosperity is the mindset of living out of necessity instead of possibility.

Leaders should never alienate themselves from the poor, if their main aim is to alleviate poverty.

Our contemporary poverty is as transparent as glass and as invisible as the air. Our poverty is kilometer-long lines, the constant elbowing, spiteful officials, trains late without reason, the water cut off by some disaster (...), the monotony of living without any hope whatsoever, the decaying historic cities, the provinces emptying the rivers poisoned. Our poverty is the grace of the totalitarian state by whose grace we live.