Quotes & Sayings About Poor Countries

UN studies conducted in more than forty developing countries show that the birth rate falls as women gain equality ... I believe income-earning opportunities that empower poor women ... will have more impact on curbing population growth that the current system of "encouraging" family planning practices through intimidation tactics.. Family planning should be left to the family. — Muhammad Yunus

Extreme weather events continue to grow more frequent and intense in rich and poor countries alike, not only devastating lives, but also infrastructure, institutions, and budgets - an unholy brew which can create dangerous security vacuums. — Ban Ki-moon

The main difference lies in wage levels, which is because our workers are not yet as well trained as in other countries. We are a poor country. This is why we must accept the conditions that prevail in international markets. But our trade unions do represent the rights of workers. — Nguyen Minh Triet

There's a transparency revolution sweeping the world. The more you can have transparency of payments, the more you'll be able to follow the money and the more you'll be able to see that payments for mineral rights in poor countries actually go to the people who need it, and don't get put into a kleptocrat's pocket. Transparency is terribly important for us. — Michael Elliott

When I travel around the world, I see that poor countries sell their grain to the West while their own children starve in their arms. And we feed it to livestock. So we can eat a steak? Am I the only one who sees this as a crime? Every morsel of meat we eat is slapping the tear-stained face of a starving child. When I look into her eyes, should I be silent? The Earth can produce enough for everyone's need. But not enough for everyone's greed. — Philip Wollen

There is a vulgar persuasion, that the ignorance of women, by favoring their subordination, ensures their utility. 'Tis the same argument employed by the ruling few against the subject many in aristocracies; by the rich against the poor in democracies; by the learned professions against the people in all countries. — Frances Wright

People from the world's richest countries should be prepared to accept the burden of debt reduction for heavily indebted poor countries, and should urge their leaders to fulfill the pledges made to reduce world poverty, especially in Africa, by the year 2015. — Pope Benedict XVI

The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse. — Lester R. Brown

Aid is the process by which the poor in rich countries subsidize the rich in poor countries. — Peter Thomas Bauer

My father's music gives hope to people and also inspires them to break the bonds of injustice and to be positive in life. I've seen that everywhere I go, especially in poor countries and poor neighborhoods. — Ziggy Marley

In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless. — Adam Davidson

Freedom is partial to no race. Freedom has no religion. Freedom favors no ethnicity. Freedom discriminates not between rich and poor countries. Inevitably freedom will overwhelm Ethiopia. — Eskinder Nega

One of the greatest concerns that I had when I became President was the vast array of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union and a few other countries, and also the great proliferation of conventional weapons, non-nuclear weapons, particularly as a tremendous burden on the economies of developing or very poor countries. — Jimmy Carter

Nuclear power is a permanent disaster. Producing its uranium fuel is an environmental disaster - now tucked and folded over the horizon in mostly-poor countries where miners are paid $5 a day and unprotected against radiation. Building reactors is a financial disaster, always shifted to government subsidies. Waste disposal is both an environmental and economic disaster. When the fateful time comes to decommission the Doomsday Machines, after the easy 10-year life extensions run out, this is another economic disaster. But when a reactor becomes what it really is - the most massive Dirty Bomb you or Bin Laden (radhi Allah anhu) can imagine - the nuclear disaster will be hard to yank out of the media, quicktime, and carry on like nothing ever happened. — Andrew McKillop

The invention of the micro-loan was a big surprise to me. Who would have guessed loans of less than $20 made to poor people in undeveloped countries could create thriving local economies? And, even more surprisingly, that they more reliably pay off their debts than the wealthy of the world. — Joel A. Barker

The capitalist "head office" can allow itself the luxury of creating
and believing its own myths of opulence, but the poor countries on the
capitalist periphery know that myths cannot be eaten. — Eduardo Galeano

In middle-income countries, inequality becomes a problem because you can see there is a layer of people who are doing well, while the poor are still stuck there. We have 300 million poor in India. — Sri Mulyani Indrawati

It's not funny at all that we do all that advertising for children. Why is advertising for children allowed? What possible reason can there be for having those effing adverts on TV for all this crap that's made by poor people in poor countries that we sell our children who have too much? — Emma Thompson

Countries around the world provide frightening examples of what happens to societies when they reach the level of inequality toward which we are moving. It is not a pretty picture: countries where the rich live in gated communities, waited upon by hordes of low-income workers; unstable political systems where populists promise the masses a better life, only to disappoint. Perhaps most importantly, there is an absence of hope. In these countries, the poor know that their prospects of emerging from poverty, let along making it to the top, are minuscule. This is not something we should be striving for. — Joseph E. Stiglitz

We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly. Let the owners of the immoveable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back. — Theodor Herzl

In many Latin American countries, the historic ties of Catholic bishops with the political elite rendered them less sensitive to the conditions of the poor and especially of indigenous people. — Moises Naim

What is the Obama Doctrine? It seems to be one of disengagement, to try to ignore the hot, religious, dry, poor countries from Algeria to Pakistan. — Richard Engel

Niger is not an isolated island of desperation. It lies within a sea of problems across Africa - particularly the 'forgotten emergencies' in poor countries or regions with little strategic or material appeal. — Desmond Tutu

And it is practically the same in the case of the four or five million poor peasants in France, and also for Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, and two of the Scandinavian countries. Everywhere small and medium sized industry prevails. — Herman Gorter

The wider the spread between the wealthy few and the impoverished many, the worse the social problems: a statement which appears to be true for rich and poor countries alike. What matters is not how affluent a country is but how unequal it is. — Tony Judt

The more time I spent in developing countries, and the more time I spent talking to poor people, I realized what they want more than anything is a good job. — Leila Janah

Most poor people live in the poorest countries. — Bill Gates

I should be judged as a captain who went from Spain to the Indies to conquer a people numerous and warlike, whose manners and religion are very different from ours, who live in sierras and mountains, without fixed settlements, and where by divine will I have placed under the sovereignty of the King and Queen our Lords, an Other World, whereby Spain, which was reckoned poor, is become the richest of countries. Columbus is coming from the Indies as a prisoner to Cadiz. — Christopher Columbus

The growing use of biofuel will be an inestimable contribution to the generation of income, social inclusion and reduction of poverty in many poor countries of the world. — Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva

Charities are now working to give people in poor countries access to the Internet. But shouldn't we spend that money on providing health clinics and safe water? Aren't these things more relevant? I have no intention of downplaying the importance of the Internet, but its impact has been exaggerated. — Ha-Joon Chang

They argue that, if the governments of developed countries want a fifty-fifty chance of hitting the agreed-upon international target of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle between rich and poor nations, then wealthy countries need to start cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by something like 8 to 10 percent a year - and they need to start right now. The idea that such deep cuts are required used to be controversial in the mainstream climate community, where the deadlines for steep reductions always seemed to be far off in the future (an 80 percent cut by 2050, for instance). But as emissions have soared and as tipping points loom, that is changing rapidly. Even Yvo de Boer, who held the U.N.'s top climate position until 2009, remarked recently that "the only way" negotiators "can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy."48 — Naomi Klein

The UK has a poor investment record. According to IMF data, we have come seventh out of the top seven industrialised countries since 1999. — Frances O'Grady

Inequality and poverty, health and wealth are hand in hand.
And if we are all born equal that should be true in all lands.
We cannot divide the world between poor and rich countries.
It's like saying the ones are good, the others are junkies.
That can only increase more prejudice, miseries and sorrow.
Turning the wheel today it will lead to a better tomorrow. — Ana Claudia Antunes

Several Mohammedan countries in North Africa and the Middle East are precisely in a period of fourteenth-century development and can show us, in a number of respects, a reflection of what the European medieval world was like. Similar towns, their houses piled one upon another, narrow swarming streets, enclosing a few sumptuous palaces; the same extremes of appalling misery among the poor and of opulence among great lords; the same story-tellers at the corners of the streets, propagating both myths and news; the same population, nine-tenths illiterate, submitting through long years to oppression and then suddenly rebelling violently in murderous panic; the same influence of religious conscience upon public affairs; the same fanaticism; the same intrigues among the powerful; the same hate among rival factions; the same plots so curiously ravelled that their solution lies only in the spilling of blood! — Maurice Druon

My Country's trying to save the World, stop the wars, relieve the poor, feed the hungry, heal the sick and liberate the captives that are bound by countries like America! — David Berg

Foreign aid has been perfected so that it subsidizes corporate U.S. agriculture while preventing poor countries from developing profitable agriculture or feeding themselves. — Nicholas Von Hoffman

To all of which is added a selection from the elementary schools of subjects of the most promising genius, whose parents are too poor to give them further education, to be carried at the public expense through the college and university. The object is to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country, for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind, which, in proportion to our population, shall be double or treble of what it is in most countries. — Thomas Jefferson

Being poor is neither history nor permanent but a status. Writers who begin with this sentence "X is a poorest country in the world," to describe any African country are lacking intelligence. How would they feel if we turned the tables and used sentences that portray historical offenses committed to other countries? I bet nobody would like to read, "X is a country that killed millions of Y during Z's regime. — Gloria D. Gonsalves

also on June 22nd JB vetoes the Homestead Bill ... This bill, which proposes to give him ("the honest poor man," ... ) land at an almost nominal price, out of the property of the government, will go far to demoralize the people and repress this noble spirit of independence. It may introduce among us those pernicious social theories which have proved so disastrous in other countries. — John Updike

If the level and amount of consumption and waste of the western rich countries ever reaches the poor countries, it will mean the end of humanity. The big world corporations are busy doing it ... The production, selling, consumption, accumulation, wastes' and advertisement explosions in the western rich countries and the continued population explosion in the poor countries will turn into major catastrophes. — Robert Muller

Gore Vidal, the American writer, once described the American economic system as 'free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich'. Macroeconomic policy on the global scale is a bit like that. It is Keynesianism for the rich countries and monetarism for the poor. — Ha-Joon Chang

We [US] are the biggest per person, by a substantial amount, greenhouse emitters, and we give the most foreign aid, not per person but in absolute. This is another issue where hopefully we will take a long-term approach which, even though we sometimes have a hard time doing that, it's easier for us, as a rich country with this kind of scientific depth, than it is for the poor countries who will suffer the problems. — Bill Gates

We in the West must bear in mind that the poor countries are poor primarily because we have exploited them through political or economic colonialism. — Martin Luther King Jr.

One of the things we have to remember about the poorest countries in the world is that parents, extremely poor parents, are making the choice of whether to send their girls to school. And they are struggling with lack of water, lack of firewood, and lack of care for their youngest children. And those burdens fall on the girls. — Gene Sperling

All rich countries now employ legions of functionaries whose primary function is to make poor people feel bad about themselves. — David Graeber

If the U.S. wants to help people in tsunami-hit countries like Sri Lanka and Indonesia - not to mention other poor countries in Africa - there's one step that would cost us nothing and would save hundreds of thousands of lives. It would be to allow DDT in malaria-ravaged countries. — Nicholas D. Kristof

Let's face it. There are good people and bad people everywhere. Illiteracy, poor education, wars, greed , corruption and similar factors were responsible for the problems in both India and Pakistan. Religious fanatics benefited from these factors and developed formidable socio-political strongholds in both countries. — Vivek Pereira

I believe that we are at or near the apex of a great civilization ... In 50-100 years, if we're a poor third to some countries in Asia, I wouldn't be surprised. If I had to bet, the part of the world that will do best will be Asia. — Charlie Munger

The outcome document known as "Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development" highlights poverty eradication as the overreaching goal of the new development agenda and has at its core the integration of the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. The emerging development agenda is unique in that it calls for action by all countries, poor, rich and middle-income. The 'five Ps' people, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnership - capture the broad scope of the agenda. The SDGs are expected to be achieved by 2030. — New Media Wing

Big meetings and big talk are not enough in a world that is hungry for change. Big action - world leaders keeping their promises, and developing countries committing resources while listening ardently to the voice of the small farmer - is needed to bring big results and prosperity to the world's poor. — Sylvia Mathews Burwell

Sometimes it looks as if, the better off they [nations] become, the bigger do they conceive the gap between what is actually their lot and what would be desirable, while in the poor countries large masses of people seem to be satisfied by merely surviving. — Gunnar Myrdal

In a system of free trade and free markets poor countries - and poor people - are not poor because others are rich. Indeed, if others became less rich the poor would in all probability become still poorer. — Margaret Thatcher

Some very poor countries run great vaccination systems, and some richer ones run terrible programs. — Bill Gates

In a way, underdevelopment is a paradox. Many parts of the world that are naturally rich are actually poor and parts that are not so well off in wealth of soil and sun-soil are enjoying the highest standards of living. When the capitalists from the developed parts of the world try to explain this paradox, they often make it sound as though there is something "God-given" about the situation. One bourgeois economist, in a book on development, accepted that the comparative statistics of the world today show a gap that is much larger than it was before. By his own admission, the gap between the developed and underdeveloped countries has increased by at least 15 to 20 times over the last 150 years. However, the bourgeois economist in question does not give a historical explanation, nor does he consider that there is a relationship of exploitation which allowed capitalist parasites to grow fat and impoverished the dependencies. Instead he puts forward a biblical explanation! Pg. 21 — Walter Rodney

I used to work for the World Health Organisation in poor countries all over the world - Bangladesh, Korea, the Philippines and India. You learn a whole range of things about how other people are living and try to connect with them to gain an understanding of where they're coming from. — Robert Winston

In poor countries, we still need better ways to measure the effectiveness of the many government workers providing health services. They are the crucial link bringing tools such as vaccines and education to the people who need them most. How well trained are they? Are they showing up to work? — Bill Gates

A free market, a vigorous civil society, the spontaneous "wisdom of crowds" are all important components of a working democracy, but none can ultimately replace the functions of a strong, hierarchical government. There has been a broad recognition among economists in recent years that "institutions matter": poor countries are poor not because they lack resources, but because they lack effective political institutions. We need therefore to better understand where those institutions come from. — Francis Fukuyama

China has always maintained that all countries, big or small, rich or poor, strong or weak, are equal members of the international community and they should stand and speak in the world as such. — Li Peng

Growth is improving the lot of the poor in many countries, reducing poverty by half since 1981. Freer trade could accelerate progress. — Francois Bourguignon

Yes, writers are writing in all corners of the world. Yes they are writing in countries rich and poor. Yes, they are writing despite threats to their freedom of speech or even to their very lives. . . . everywhere on earth writers were writing in their own language. — Minae Mizumura

The four horsemen of the human apocalypse, which cause the most premature and avoidable death in poor countries, are and will be for many years the same: hunger, dirty water, indoor smoke and malaria, which kill respectively about seven, three, three and two people per minute. If you want to do your fellow human beings good, spend your effort on combating those so that people can prosper, ready to meet climate challenges as they arrive. Economists estimate that a dollar spent on mitigating climate change brings ninety cents of benefits compared with $20 benefits per dollar spent on healthcare and $16 per dollar spent on hunger. Keeping climate at 1990 levels, assuming it could be done, would leave more than 90 per cent of human mortality causes untouched. — Matt Ridley

I don't see why OPEC countries should continue to cut production just to keep the price of oil high. This will not affect the industrial countries alone, it will also hit poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Who will look after them? — Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani

Can our culture be reclaimed? How can we stay free in the next century? While people of other countries have been restricted m to pursue prosperity, bounded only by the limits of his or her imagination. Besides, only a conservative would ask how we can STAY prosperous and free in the 21st century. A liberal would whine that only a few are prosperous-the evil rich who have somehow gotten rich off the backs of the poor. — Rush Limbaugh

Using money in one's attempt to put an end to poverty is like using a border in one's attempt to put an end to xenophobia. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Climate change is ... a gross injustice-poor people in developing countries bear over 90% of the burden-through death, disease, destitution and financial loss-yet are least responsible for creating the problem. Despite this, funding from rich countries to help the poor and vulnerable adapt to climate change is not even 1 percent of what is needed. — Barbara Stocking

Listen to me: Life is not about principles; it's about happiness.'
'But if you don't have any principles, and if you don't have faith, you can't be happy at all,' said Kadife.
'That's true. But in a brutal country like ours, where human life is cheap, it's stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs? High ideas? Only people in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.'
'Actually, it's the other way round. In a poor country, people's sole consolation comes from their beliefs. — Orhan Pamuk

One of the best ways countries can combat poverty is to use development assistance to promote a growing private sector, in which the poor can fully participate. — John Danilovich

It wouldn't cost too much to change the rules of trade so that poor countries can work their way out of poverty. But the world's leaders won't act unless they hear enough people telling them. And every day they fail to act, thousands of people die because they can't afford the basics of survival. — Edward De Bono

The deaths of children in poor countries from diarrhea, measles, and malaria have become part of the background of the world we live in, and if we know about it at all, we are likely to believe that it is a problem that will always be with us. But that isn't so. In the last two years, we have saved a million children. In the coming years, if we all give substantially more, we can save the entire 8.8 million. — Peter Singer

One of the most damaging myths of our time is that poor countries live in poverty because of a conspiracy of the rich countries, who arrange things so as to keep them underdeveloped, in order to exploit them. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female. — Nicholas D. Kristof

In many poor countries, the problem is not so much individual thugs and rapists but an entire culture of sexual predation. — Nicholas D. Kristof

99% of the casualties linked to climate change occur in developing countries. Worst hit are the world's poorest groups. While climate change will increasingly affect wealthy countries, the brunt of the impact is being borne by the poor, whose plight simply receives less attention. — Rajendra K. Pachauri

The International Monetary Fund basically acted as the world's debt enforcers - "You might say, the high-finance equivalent of the guys who come to break your legs." I launched into historical background, explaining how, during the '70s oil crisis, OPEC countries ended up pouring so much of their newfound riches into Western banks that the banks couldn't figure out where to invest the money; how Citibank and Chase therefore began sending agents around the world trying to convince Third World dictators and politicians to take out loans (at the time, this was called "go-go banking"); how they started out at extremely low rates of interest that almost immediately skyrocketed to 20 percent or so due to tight U.S. money policies in the early '80s; how, during the '80s and '90s, this led to the Third World debt crisis; how the IMF then stepped in to insist that, in order to obtain refinancing, poor countries would be obliged to abandon price supports on — David Graeber

Seychelles said at U.N. climate talks. The report was bound to sharpen disputes in Lima over who pays the bills for the impacts of global warming, whose primary cause is the burning of coal, oil and gas but which also includes deforestation. It has long been the thorniest issue at the U.N. negotiations, now in their 20th round. Rich countries have pledged to help the developing world convert to clean energy and adapt to shifts in global weather that are already adversely affecting crops, human health and economies. But poor countries say they're not seeing enough cash. Projecting the annual costs that poor countries will face by 2050 just to adapt, the United Nations Environment Program report deemed the previous estimate of $70 billion to $100 billion "a significant underestimate." It had been based on 2010 World Bank numbers. — Anonymous

I don't like dealing with money transactions in poor countries. I get confused between the feeling that I shouldn't haggle with poverty and getting ripped off — Alex Garland

Gregory is a good boy, though all the Latin he has learned, all the sonorous periods of the great authors, have rolled through his head and out again, like stones. Still, you think of Thomas More's boy: offspring of a scholar all Europe admired, and poor young John can barely stumble through his Pater Noster. Gregory is a fine archer, a fine horseman, a shining star in the tilt yard, and his manners cannot be faulted. He speaks reverently to his superiors, not scuffling his feet or standing on one leg, and he is mild and polite with those below him. He knows how to bow to foreign diplomats in the manner of their own countries, sits at table without fidgeting or feeding spaniels, can neatly carve and joint any fowl if requested to serve his elders. He doesn't slouch around with his jacket off one shoulder, or look in windows to admire himself, or stare around in church, or interrupt old men, or finish their stories for them. If anyone sneezes, he says, 'Christ help you! — Hilary Mantel

Every Christian in America has some minimal responsibility to get involved in helping the poor brethren in the church in other countries. — K.P. Yohannan

If you withdraw the incredible focus on polio, it will spread back, and in poor countries you'll get something like 100,000 cases a year. So by being very intense and getting the cases down to zero, what you do is you avoid all the future cases. — Bill Gates

Human dignity is independent of national borders. We must always defend the interests of the poor and the persecuted in other countries. — Kjell Magne Bondevik

Look at other countries that have tried to have federally controlled health care. They have poor-quality health care. Our health-care system is the envy of the world because we believe in making sure that the decisions are made by doctors and patients, not by officials in the nation's capital. — George W. Bush

If the relatively rich participating countries want to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, they will have to pay at least some poor countries to reduce their emissions. Achievement of substantial reduction in this way implies international transfers of wealth on a scale well beyond anything in recorded history. There is no effective political support for such a Herculean effort, particularly in the United States. — Henry Sylvester Jacoby

Around the world, countries flush with cash but poor in arable land are now rushing to secure vast amounts of acreage in land-rich but underdeveloped nations. In theory, of course, such trades could benefit both sides, but in practice they usually raise extraordinarily troubling ethical and political questions. What — Michael T. Klare

During World War II, a few years after Norma Jeane's time in an orphanage, thousands of children were evacuated from the air raids and poor rations of London during the Blitz, and placed with volunteer families or group homes in the English countryside or even in other countries. It was only postwar studies comparing these children to others left behind that opened the eyes of many experts to the damage caused by emotional neglect. In spite of living in bombed-out ruins and constant fear of attack, the children who had been left with their mothers and families tended to fare better than those who had been evacuated to physical safety. Emotional security, continuity, a sense of being loved unconditionally for oneself - all those turn out to be as important to a child's development as all but the most basic food and shelter. — Gloria Steinem

There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. — Vladimir Putin

In the 1950s, America had picked up the globe by the heels and shaken the change from its pockets. Europe had become a poor cousin - all crests and no table settings. And the indistinguishable countries of Africa, Asia, and South America had just begun skittering across our schoolroom walls like salamanders in the sun. True, — Amor Towles

Poor countries are being forced to deal with an unprecedented health crisis without the means to tackle it . Governments can only show how seriously they are taking this crisis by taking immediate action to provide four million extra health workers and to grant those in need access to affordable medicines. — Annie Lennox

In talking about misogyny and gender-based violence, it would be easy to slip into the conceit that men are the villains. But it's not true. Granted, men are often brutal to women. Yet it is women who routinely manage brothels in poor countries, who ensure that their daughter's genitals are cut, who feed sons before daughters, who take their sons but not their daughters to clinics for vaccination. — Nicholas D. Kristof

Nobody in rich countries wants to face responsibility for the lives of people in poor countries. They just want cheap groceries. — Greg Baxter

It became clear I wanted to be a development economist. I mean, I said I wanted to work on the economics of poor countries. And I'd actually say that I don't think that was so much about narrowing the gap as about increasing their incomes, which means economic growth, which is really my prime interest. — James Mirrlees

Economic development is not a zero-sum game; the world does not need poor countries in order to have rich countries, nor must some people be poor in order for others to be rich. Families who live in public housing on the South Side of Chicago are not poor because Bill Gates lives in a big house. They are poor despite the fact that Bill Gates lives in a big house. For a complex array of reasons, America's poor have not shared in the productivity gains spawned by Microsoft Windows. Bill Gates did not take their pie away; he did not stand in the way of their success or benefit from their misfortunes. — Charles Wheelan

The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible. — Martin Luther King Jr.

If poverty is not a result of lack of resources or opportunities, but of poor institutions, poor government, and toxic politics, giving money to poor countries - particularly giving money to the governments of poor countries - is likely to perpetuate and prolong poverty, not eliminate it. The — Angus Deaton

With unfailing consistency, U.S. intervention has been on the side of the rich and powerful of various nations at the expense of the poor and needy. Rather than strengthening democracies, U.S. leaders have overthrown numerous democratically elected governments or other populist regimes in dozens of countries ... whenever these nations give evidence of putting the interests of their people ahead of the interests of multinational corporate interests. — Michael Parenti

A cynic had defined aid as simply the system by which poor white people in rich countries gave money to rich black people in poor countries to put into Swiss bank accounts. — Wilbur Smith

In the United States the legacy of settler colonialism can be seen in the endless wars of aggression and occupations; the trillions spent on war machinery, military bases, and personnel instead of social services and quality public education; the gross profits of corporations, each of which has greater resources and funds than more than half the countries in the world yet pay minimal taxes and provide few jobs for US citizens; the repression of generation after generation of activists who seek to change the system; the incarceration of the poor, particularly descendants of enslaved Africans; the individualism, carefully inculcated, that on the one hand produces self-blame for personal failure and on the other exalts ruthless dog-eat-dog competition for possible success, even though it rarely results; and high rates of suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual violence against women and children, homelessness, dropping out of school, and gun violence. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

There is no more reprehensible god playing than the use of children for sexual gratification, the exploitation of widows and their children by distant relatives after the death of a father, the misuse of police powers to extort false confessions and protect the perpetrators of sexual violence, or the serial enslavement of generation after generation to extract payments on unpayable debts. All of these and more are abuses of power that IJM targets in countries around the world where the public justice system does not work on behalf of the poor and powerless. — Andy Crouch

Most problems in poor countries are locally generated even though international factors do play a role. — Andrew Mwenda

OUCH

"The arrabal (a term used for poor neighbourhoods in Argentina and Uruguay) and carpa (informal mobile theatre set up inside tents, once common in Latin America), with their caliente (hot) rhythms such as the rumba or the cha-cha-cha, were conquering audiences all over the world, a trend allegorised in song lyrics about their popularity among the French and other non-Latin Americans - "The Frenchman has fun like this/as does the German/and the Irishman has a ball/as does even the Muslim" ("Cachita") - even as they filtered in the presence of a blackness - "and if you want to dance/look for your Cachita/and tell her "Come on negrita"/let's dance" - denied in the official discourse of those Spanish=speaking countries wielding the greatest economic power in the region: namely, Argentina and Mexico, the latter of which would eventually incorporate Afro-Latin American culture into its cinema - although being careful to mark it as Cuban and not Mexican. — Robert McKee Irwin

The Statue of Liberty's got this invitation: 'Give me your tired, your poor, your reeking homeless
'
'Huddled masses,' said Ira. 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.'
...
Okay, fine. So like everybody in the old countries says, 'Hey, I'm a huddled mass,' and they all wanna come over. — Neal Shusterman