Famous Quotes on Poverty
"Eliminating world poverty is in Britain’s interests – and is one of the greatest moral challenges we face…. This will need and effort right across Government, to put our pledges into practice…. But there is still a long way to go. It will need commitment, and continuing support from the British public, to achieve this. But if we work together, it can be done. There is no greater or just cause facing us today."
- Tony Blair, Prime Minister, July 2006, in his foreword to the White Paper on Eliminating World Poverty.
"In the UK, one in every six citizens supported the Make Poverty History campaign….True, by the end of the year , poverty had not been made history. Most poor people continue their lives in countries still far from achieving the Millennium Development Goal, and too many children had died – deaths that could have been prevented.
….So, now the challenge for the world’s governments is to make good on these commitments – especially on trade where we have failed so far – and to prove that aid increases and debt relief really will make a difference. We have a double promise to fulfill: a promise to the world’s poor not to let them down; and a promise to our own people that our aid will truly help those fighting for a more just tomorrow.
- Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for International Development, July 2006 in his preface to the White Paper on Eliminating World Poverty.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
- Former U.S. President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a speech on April 16, 1953
"True compassion is more than flinging a coin at a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"To tackle the underlying roots of violence and conflict, we need a massive international effort to reduce poverty and injustice, and to promote development, democracy and human rights."
- Clare Short, Then UK International Development Secretary in a Speech to Labour Party Conference, Brighton UK, October 2001
"All that it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing."
- Sir Edmund Burke
"The question is not can the scourge of global poverty be confined to history? It can be - but will it be?"
- Cardinal Cormack Murphy-O'Connor
"God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house… God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives… God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war… God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them."
- Bono (Lead Singer U2) - An extract from his speech at 54th Annual National Prayer Breakfast, Washington DC. US
"Preventing the poorest of the poor from selling their products while we sing the virtues of the free market… that’s a justice issue. Holding children to ransom for the debts of their grandparents… That’s a justice issue. Withholding life-saving medicines out of deference to the Office of Patents… that’s a justice issue."
- Bono (Lead Singer U2) - An extract from his speech at 54th Annual National Prayer Breakfast, Washington DC. US
