War And Poverty Quotes & Sayings

The only thing I knew for sure is I hadn't slept in ten years. Not really. I'd been fighting my own monster since nine months after 9/11. I had regrets. I had pain that I still can't find words to describe. But sooner or later you have to make a choice. Maybe fate or luck or God had a plan for me in Jakarta that was greater than an educational leadership conference, a few papers and a book deal. If Vietnam was for Dad, then maybe Jakarta was for me. Indira says I shouldn't discount that it was Allah's plan. The way I see it, Allah's plan is what started my war. — Tucker Elliot

The enormous amount of financial resources and creative energy that nations have spent on wars and weapons could have been redirected to curing deadly diseases, feeding the hungry, eliminating poverty, promoting art and culture, investing in renewable clean energy, and solving a host of other important challenges facing humanity. — Newton Lee

The first quality of a soldier is constancy in enduring fatigue and hardship. Courage is only the second. Poverty privation and want are the school of the good soldier. — Napoleon Bonaparte

When understanding fails, there is always more force in reserve. As the "experiments in material and human resources control" collapse and "revolutionary development" grinds to a halt, we simply resort more openly to the Gestapo tactics that are barely concealed behind the facade of pacification. When American cities explode, we can expect the same. The technique of "limited warfare" translates neatly into a system of domestic repression - far more humane, as will quickly be explained, than massacring those who are unwilling to wait for the inevitable victory of the war on poverty. Why should a liberal intellectual be so persuaded of the virtues of a political system of four-year dictatorship? The answer seem all to plain. — Noam Chomsky

Something is wrong. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, crime, torture, corruption and the ice capades. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed. This is not what you expect to find on the resume of a supreme being. It's what you expect from an office temp with a bad attitude. — George Carlin

Listen: I'm not going to tell you what to do. We cannot make decisions for you. We came to help, but we do not want to interfere. We gave you a gift, yours to do with as you will. But you've heard all that before. We're happy to talk. To answer questions about why we don't stop war and suffering, cure cancer, end poverty, point the way to heaven or point out that there is no heaven. Ask us anything. We don't mind. We try our best to be candid, but there is an inevitable degree of mutual incomprehension. Because your qualia aren't our qualia. Because we're running models of who you think you are and what you think you know, but they're just models. Because the map isn't the territory. Because we aren't gods. We aren't even close. You know? At best, we're pipers at the gates of dawn. Who have come to this little blue planet to help. — Paul McAuley

China is now suffering from poverty, not from unequal distribution of wealth. Where there are inequalities of wealth, the methods of Marx can, of course, be used; a class war can be advocated to destroy the inequalities. But in China, where industry is not yet developed, Marx's class war and dictatorship of the proletariat are impracticable. — Sun Yat-sen

An atheist believes that a hospital
should be built instead of a church.
An atheist believes that deed must
be done instead of prayer said.
An atheist strives for involvement in life
and not escape into death.
He wants disease conquered,
poverty vanished, war eliminated. — Madalyn Murray O'Hair

Americans are blessed with great plenty; we are a generous people and we have a moral obligation to assist those who are suffering from poverty, disease, war and famine. — Adam Schiff

To fight against a war or, better yet, and entire "war machine," we had to become warriors ourselves. This is the cunning symmetry of war: Enemies tend to come to resemble one another. And this was perhaps especially so in a culture that appallingly - to us - applied the war meme to just about anything, as in the "War on Poverty. — Barbara Ehrenreich

And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy. — C.S. Lewis

So you never really tried to solve the problem.
Oh, c'mon. Can you ever "solve" poverty? Can you ever "solve" crime? Can you ever "solve" disease, unemployment, war, or any other societal herpes? Hell no. All you can hope for is to make them manageable enough to allow people to get on with their lives. That's not cynicism, that's maturity. You can't stop the rain. All you can do is just build a roof that you hope won't leak, or at least won't leak on the people who are gonna vote for you.
What does that mean?
C'mon ...
Seriously. What does that mean?
Fine, whatever, "Mister Smith goes to motherfuckin' Washington," it means that, in politics, you focus on the needs of your power base. Keep them happy, and they keep you in office. — Max Brooks

The U.N. had such lofty goals to eliminate poverty and stop war and cure diseases and help refugees - things that no one country could do. — Ted Turner

I have been brought up in a world dominated by honor. I have known neither crime, poverty, nor betrayal, and here I taste hatred for the first time: it is sublime, like a thirst for justice and revenge.
-the girl who played go — Shan Sa

Nowhere in the world, in no act of genocide, in no war, are so many people killed per minute, per hour and per day as those who are killed by hunger and poverty on our planet. — Fidel Castro

Perfectly formed life, equally contingent, equally without purpose. Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous. — Ian McEwan

Our cause is a common one. It is war between poverty and wealth ... This moneyed power is fast eating up the substance of the people. We have made war upon it, and we mean to win it. If we can, we will win through the ballot box; if not, then we shall resort to sterner means. — William H. Sylvis

Sin and death and suffering and war and poverty are not natural - they are the devastating results of our rebellion against God. We long for a return to Paradise - a perfect world, without the corruption of sin, where God walks with us and talks with us in the cool of the day. — Randy Alcorn

There are wars and poverty and so on - it's based on fear. You can cure that with your being by not being afraid. — Ram Dass

Someday war and poverty will be crazy and we will wonder how the world allowed such things to exist. — Shane Claiborne

We stand at the intersection of extreme privilege and extreme poverty, and we have a question to answer: Do I care? Am I moved by the suffering of all nations? Am I even concerned about the homeless guy on the corner? Am I willing to take the Bible at face value and concur that God is obsessed with social justice? I won't answer one day for how the US government spent billions of dollars on the war in Iraq ($816 billion and counting, when $9 billion would solve the planet's water crisis[36]), nor will I get the credit for the general philanthropy of others. It will come down to what I did. What you did. What we did together. — Jen Hatmaker

Boxing was on the one hand barbaric, unconscionable, out of place in modern society. But then, so are war, racism, poverty, and pro football. Men died boxing, yet there was nobility in defending oneself. — Ralph Wiley

It is important to note that the Great Reversal preceded the rise of the welfare state in America. Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty did not occur until the 1960s, and even FDR's relatively modest New Deal policies were not launched until the 1930s. In short, the evangelical church's retreat from poverty alleviation was fundamentally due to shifts in theology and not - as many have asserted - to government programs that drove the church away from ministry to the poor. While the rise of government programs may have exacerbated the church's retreat, they were not the primary cause. Theology matters, and the church needs to rediscover a Christ-centered, fully orbed perspective of the kingdom. — Steve Corbett

One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with the time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances. — Thomas Sowell

War, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap. They will cease only when she limits her reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted. — Margaret Sanger

But she did inject a new term and new degree of frankness into the debate on what was coming to be called the sexual revolution. Also, by this time she saw birth control as the panacea for all social ills: disease, poverty, child labor, poor wages, infant mortality, the oppression of women, drunkenness, prostitution, abortion, feeblemindedness, physical handicaps, unwanted children, war, etc. "If we are to develop in America a new [human] race with a racial soul, we must keep the birth rate within the scope of our ability to understand as well as to educate. We must not encourage reproduction beyond our capacity to assimilate our numbers so as to make the coming generation into such physically fit, mentally capable, socially alert individuals as are the ideal of a democracy" (Sanger, 1920). — David B. McCoy

that was how plenty of people felt in 634 BC in Rome, as well, when they were convinced that the city was destined to collapse after 120 years of existence. It is how people have felt at countless points in history since then. Try searching Google's library of digitised manuscripts for the phrase 'these uncertain times', and you'll find that it occurs over and over, in hundreds of journals and books, in virtually every decade the database encompasses, reaching back to the seventeenth century. 'As a matter of fact,' Watts insisted, 'our age is no more insecure than any other. Poverty, disease, war, change and death are nothing new. — Oliver Burkeman

Most people bestow tremendous power onto those human beings we consider evil, who cause of threaten harm to others, even though we know they are acting from their own pain or fear. Would ignoring evil disarm it? Don't dismiss the idea. As we have declared War on Terror, a War on Drugs, a War on Poverty, a War on Crime, the problems only seem to have gotten bigger. We cling tthe notion of evil as detrimental, unpredictable force in our world and refuse any suggestion that it is not real. We argue for our fear about terrorism or climate change or economic instability, heatedly trying to prove that things are only getting worse. And in doing so, we reinforce the principle that what we focus on grows. We create our experience by where we place our attention. What we resist, persists. — Ellen Debenport

Every morning, when people are getting up in the tent, the babies are crying, people are pushing each other at the taps outside and some children are already pulling the crusts of porridge off the pots we ate from last night, my first-born brother and I clean our shoes. Our grandmother makes us sit on our mats with our legs straight out so she can look carefully at our shoes to make sure we have done it properly. No other children in the tent have real school shoes. When we three look at them it's as if we are in a real house again, with no war, no away. — Nadine Gordimer

Each of the Iraqi children killed by the United States was our child. Each of the prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib was our comrade. Each of their screams was ours. When they were humiliated, we were humiliated. The U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq - mostly volunteers in a poverty draft from small towns and poor urban neighborhoods - are victims just as much as the Iraqis of the same horrendous process, which asks them to die for a victory that will never be theirs. — Arundhati Roy

Make no mistake. The greatest destroyer of ecology. The greatest source of waste, depletion and pollution. The greatest purveyor of violence, war, crime, poverty, animal abuse and inhumanity. The greatest generator of personal and social neurosis, mental disorders, depression, anxiety. Not to mention the greatest source of social paralysis, stopping us from moving into new methodologies for personal health, global sustainability and progress on this planet, is not some corrupt government or legislation.
Not some rogue corporation or banking cartel.
Not some flaw of human nature and not some secret cabal that controls the world.
It is the socioeconomic system itself at its very foundation. — Peter Joseph

It's the Poverty.

I lack imagination you say

No. I lack language.
The language to clarify
my resistance to the literate.
Words are a war to me.
They threaten my family.

To gain the word
to describe the loss
I risk losing everything.
I may create a monster
the word's length and body
swelling up colorful and thrilling
looming over my mother, characterized.
Her voice in the distance
unintelligible illiterate.
These are the monster's words. — Cherrie L. Moraga

Peace we want because there is another war to fight against poverty, disease and ignorance. — Indira Gandhi

The way we treat animals is the root cause of all the human suffering in the world, from poverty, starvation, disease, and war to lack of clean air and water, not to mention all the varied forms of human emotional and spiritual suffering. — Sharon Gannon

Seeing that humans in modern cultures were destroying their environment for the sake of self-indulgence, the Dokkalfar focused their attention on poorer nations, whose terrain still flourished. A century of ethnic cleansing, deforestation, and war assured the land weakened and humans stayed in abject poverty. The result was a perfect contrast. In certain parts of the world, millions of children died of starvation and disease while other countries held excesses and riches never before seen. Earth became a place of greedy extremes. Societies lost the ability to relate to one another, choosing instead to focus on their own. No one noticed the one common theme every culture held.
The world itself was dying. — Elizabeth Isaacs

There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor
both black and white
through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. — Martin Luther King Jr.

The U.S. has become the most egregious war-monger and terrorist nation in the world, as well as the long-time leading purveyor of weapons of war throughout the world, and because here at home, we have 50 million of our citizens living in poverty, one in four children surviving on Food Stamps, a collapsing education system, poor health care, and many other disasters, none of which can be addressed as long as the country keeps pouring trillions of dollars into war and militarism. This madness and criminality must end! — Dave Lindorff

I'm enthralled by the national yearning that the Russians had during the 50s and 60s. The whole century was pretty rough for them. They suffered genocide, war, poverty, and half the population was sent to labor camps. But they were determined to get into space first. — George Meyer

Too often we don't call out a wrong or expect ourselves or others to act with routine integrity, excellence, or love. There has been a worldwide failure in leadership, birthing an apathetic populace, unjustifiable poverty, unconscionable greed, and a globe ravaged and booby-trapped by war. — Brendon Burchard

In war," answered the weaver, "the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free. — Oscar Wilde

This must be a world of democracy and respect for human rights, a world freed from the horrors of poverty, hunger, deprivation and ignorance, relieved of the threat and the scourge of civil wars and external aggression and unburdened of the great tragedy of millions forced to become refugees. — Nelson Mandela

The imbalance I speak of in the world, which we see manifested in wars, violence, poverty and other depressed social conditions stems from a lack of knowledge. — Frederick Lenz

By undercutting fundamentalism and intolerance, education would curtail violence and war. By empowering women, it would curb poverty and the population explosion. — John Brockman

In a world where millions of human beings live in extreme poverty, die of malnutrition and lack medical care, where pandemics continue to kill, it is imperative to pursue good faith disarmament negotiations and to shift budgets away from weapons production, war-mongering, surveillance of private persons and devote available resources to address global challenges including humanitarian relief, environmental protection, climate change mitigation and adaptation, prevention of pandemics, and the development of a green economy. — Alfred-Maurice De Zayas

There's no way in which you can ever win a war against terror. As long as there are conditions in many parts of the world that make people desperate: poverty, disease, ignorance, etc. I hope that we will discover soon, that we can survive, only together. We can prosper only together. And I think people are beginning to realize this, that you can't have pockets of prosperity in one part of the world and huge deserts of poverty and deprivation and think you can have a stable, secure world. — Desmond Tutu

The world can seem very chaotic these days. Humankind is constantly changing, and evolving. Advances in science have made it possible to travel thousands of miles in a matter of hours. We can keep in touch with people we care about and even with the world at large with the push of a button. Many of the diseases that plagued humankind for centuries have been wiped out. Yet there is still poverty. There is still famine. There is still disease. There is still war. There is still injustice. — The Prophet Of Life

As long as superstition and ignorance prevail, humanity will fall short of eradicating war, poverty, and hunger. — Jacque Fresco

These economic, social, cultural and educational causes of opportunity inequality are complex. And they will not be solved by continuing with the same stale Washington ideas. Five decades and trillions of dollars after President Johnson waged his War on Poverty, the results of this big-government approach are in. — Marco Rubio

For too long, we've attached some mythic notion to government solutions, and yet, 40 years after we began the War on Poverty, poverty still abounds. — Rand Paul

Failure of government programs prompts more determined effort, while the loss of liberty is ignored or rationalized away ... whether is it is the war on poverty, drugs, terrorism ... or the current Hitler of the day, an appeal to patriotism is used to convince the people that a little sacrifice of liberty, here or there, is a small price to pay ... The results, though, are frightening and will soon become even more so. — Ron Paul

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. This 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 clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

There was the murdered corpse, in covert laid,
And violent death in thousand shapes displayed;
The city to the soldier's rage resigned;
Successless wars, and poverty behind;
Ships burnt in fight, or forced on rocky shores,
And the rash hunter strangled by the boars;
The newborn babe by nurses overlaid;
And the cook caught within the raging fire he made. — Geoffrey Chaucer

If progressive deep frames had been articulated and present in the public mind, the idea of a "war on terror" never would have made sense. If we viewed our strength as our diplomatic ability to forge international consensus and coalitions, and if we recognized that killing and maiming civilians through military action creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terrorism, we wouldn't have looked to our military to solve the problem. Had progressive deep frames been prevalent at the time of 9/11, Americans would have taken "war on terror" as a powerful metaphor but not a literal guide to action, like the "war on poverty." They would have seen it as a major crime problem - like international organized crime - and sought to bring these criminals to justice by the means that work best, like tracing bank accounts, placing spies in their organizations, and so on. It — George Lakoff

Martin Luther King was talking about racism, war and poverty. I think we have made progress enormous progress in racism and war, but we have made little or no progress in poverty. And it's because the economy has gotten more and more complex as we have globalized. — Andrew Young

Deep thinkers who look everywhere for the mysterious causes of poverty, ignorance, crime and war need look no further than their own mirrors. We are all born into this world poor and ignorant, and with thoroughly selfish and barbaric impulses. Those of us who turn out any other way do so largely through the efforts of others, who civilized us before we got big enough to do too much damage to the world or ourselves. — Thomas Sowell

We could say that compassion is the ultimate attitude of wealth: an anti-poverty attitude, a war on want. It contains all sorts of heroic, juicy, positive, visionary, expansive qualities. And it implies larger scale thinking, a freer and more expansive way of relating to yourself and the world. — Chogyam Trungpa

The United States spends over $87 billion conducting a war in Iraq while the United Nations estimates that for less than half that amount we could provide clean water, adequate diets, sanitations services and basic education to every person on the planet. And we wonder why terrorists attack us. — John Perkins

The time has come for an all-out war against poverty. The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for "the least of these". — Martin Luther King Jr.

Ottoman provinces were re-formed and cobbled together into states. The region was carved up with little regard to ethnic, religious, or territorial concerns. The flawed and cavalier treaties of World War I explain to a large degree why the Middle East remains unstable and angry today. Every Muslim schoolchild is taught this arc of history and resents it: Islam's golden era of the Arab caliphate, the Crusades, the Mongol devastation, the rise of the Ottomans, World War I, the carving up of the Middle East by Europe, and the poverty, weakness, and wars in the Muslim world of the last century. This is the basic and sad narrative taught at every mosque, and it has the benefit of being broadly accurate. — Richard Engel

Alexa and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for for choice and certainty. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival. — Adrienne Rich

The 1860s ushered in a number of changes that profoundly transformed the nation. While the emancipation of enslaved people and the increased resettlement of Native Americans represent critical turning points in the political, legal, social, and economic history of the United States, these transformations produced devastating and unanticipated consequences. When soldiers in the North reached for the rifles that hung above the mantles of their front doors and marched off to war, they did so in the name of ending slavery. But in the effort to dismantle the institution of slavery, very few considered how ex-slaves would survive the war and emancipation. An abstract idea about freedom became a flesh-and-blood reality in which epidemic outbreaks, poverty, and suffering threatened former bondspeople as they abandoned slavery and made their way toward freedom. The — Jim Downs

The Hell's Angels are very definitely a lower-class phenomenon, but their backgrounds are not necessarily poverty-stricken. Despite some grim moments, their parents seem to have had credit. Most of the outlaws are the sons of people who came to California either just before or during World War II. Many have lost contact with their families, and I have never met an Angel who claimed to have a hometown in any sense that people who use that term might understand it. Terry the Tramp, for instance, is "from" Detroit, Norfolk, Long Island, Los Angeles, Fresno and Sacramento. As a child, he lived all over the country, not in poverty but in total mobility. Like most of the others, he has no roots. He relates entirely to the present, the moment, the action. — Hunter S. Thompson

In public discourse, the challenge is not to stifle robust debate, but rather to make sure that it is real debate. The first obligation for Christians is to listen carefully to opponents and if they are not willing to do so, then Christians should simply be silent. To engage in a war of words is to engage in a symbolic violence that is fundamentally at odds with the gospel. And too often, on such hot button issues as poverty, abortion, race relations, and homosexuality, the poor, children, minorities, and gays are used as weapons in ideological warfare. This too is an expression of instrumentalization.16 — James Davison Hunter

The right of individual property is no doubt the very corner-stone of civilization, as hitherto understood; but I am a little impatient of being told that property is entitled to exceptional consideration because it bears all the burdens of the state. It bears those, indeed, which can be most easily borne, but poverty pays with its person the chief expenses of war, pestilence, and famine. — James Russell Lowell

The greatest predictor of social pathology in children is fatherlessness, greater even than poverty. In his book Fatherless Generation (Zondervan) John Sowers claims, "The most reliable predictor for gang activity and youth violence is neither social class nor race or education but fatherlessness." In Fatherless America (Basic Books) David Blankenhorn says, "It is no exaggeration to say that fatherlessness is the most harmful demographic trend of this generation. It is the engine driving our most urgent social problems". I am convinced that the damage to humanity caused by the epidemic of unfathered men and women is far greater than the damage caused by war and disease combined. — Craig Wilkinson

Indeed, ask every man separately whether he thinks it laudable and worthy of a man of this age to hold a position from which he receives a salary disproportionate to his work; to take from the people
often in poverty
taxes to be spent on constructing cannon, torpedoes, and other instruments of butchery, so as to make war on people with whom we wish to be at peace, and who feel the same wish in regard to us; or to receive a salary for devoting one's whole life to constructing these instruments of butchery, or to preparing oneself and others for the work of murder. — Leo Tolstoy

Much of the image of the amazingness of America comes from the movies into other cultures. And it's much the same thing when you reverse it. Much of Africa is presented through poverty, through drought and war. [But] you're not presenting people, you're not presenting countries, you're not presenting complexity, and so people can't care about an amorphous mass called Africa. — Chris Abani

Religion must be used in furthering great works of justice and reform. It must be used to establish right relations between different groups of men, and thus to make a reality of brotherhood. It must be used to abolish poverty, the breeding ground of all misery and crime, by distributing equably among men the abundance of the soil. And it must be used to get rid of war and to establish enduring peace. Here is the supreme test of the effectiveness of religion. — John Haynes Holmes

Poverty and Discontent appear in every Face (except the Countenances of the Rich) and dwell upon every Tongue." He spoke of a few men, fed by "Lust of Power, Lust of Fame, Lust of Money," who got rich during the war. — Howard Zinn

Racism is not nearly as important as poverty. That's the same around the world. What look like ethnic problems are really economic issues. If you look closely at all these conflicts around the world, they come down to poverty and economics and resources. The more poverty, the worse the war. — Marjane Satrapi

Our brave men and women have made many sacrifices in just wars to defeat the forces of evil. We have exported our greatest values: freedom and opportunity, which have lifted millions out of poverty. At home, these values allow Americans to use their God-given potential and make their dreams reality. — Marco Rubio

It seems we've been at cross purposes, doesn't it? But it's no use now. As long as there was Bonnie, there was a chance that we might be happy. I liked to think that Bonnie was you, a little girl again, before the war, and poverty had done things to you. She was so like you, and I could pet her, and spoil her, as I wanted to spoil you. But when she went, she took everything. — Margaret Mitchell

Seventy-five percent of our energy around the earth is being poured into war efforts. Are we servants of death and destruction? This 75 percent of energy could be poured into life, into the service of life-and there will be laughter, and there will be greater health, and there will be more wealth, more food. There will be no poverty. There is no need for poverty to exist at all. — Rajneesh

There can be no freedom for Africa without justice; and no justice without declaring war on Africa's poverty, disease and famine with as much vehemence as we remove the tyrant and the terrorist. — Tony Blair

We all have a stake - equally. Because if we do not save the environment and save the Earth, then whatever we do in civil rights or in a war against poverty will be of no meaning, because then we will have the equality of extinction and the brotherhood of the grave. — James Farmer

Through a policy driven approach we have wage a war against poverty and we are confident we will win this war. — Narendra Modi

Instead of concentrating on the war against poverty, global attention is focused on another kind of slaughter - on something that is intangible and yet being tackled by all the possible military means we can muster. And all the lofty declarations by world leaders about combatting poverty that were lauded by the General Assembly turned out to be damp squibs. — Muhammad Yunus

People say that the monetary system produces incentive. This may be true in limited areas, but it also produces greed, embezzlement, corruption, pollution, jealousy, anger, crime, war, poverty, tremendous scarcity, and unnecessary human suffering. You have to look at the entire picture. — Jacque Fresco

Social justice has to do with issues such as poverty, inequality, war, racism, sexism, abortion, and lack of concern for ecology because what lies at the root at each of these is not so much someone's private sin but rather a huge, blind system that is inherently unfair. — Ronald Rolheiser

It would now be technically possible to unify the world, abolish war and poverty altogether, if men desired their own happiness more than the misery of their enemies. — Bertrand Russell

Today continuing poverty and distress are a deeper and more important cause of international tensions, of the conditions that can produce war, than previously. — Lester B. Pearson

We come from an abundant, endlessly providing, always forthcoming, always giving source. If we would just stay like that, if we would be forthcoming and giving and sharing and allowing, excluding no one, then it wouldn't be possible to have wars in the Middle East, or poverty in Africa, or any of these kinds of things. — Wayne Dyer

If a person has lived through war, poverty and love, he has lived a full life — O. Henry

The ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry, but they cannot kill ignorance, illness, poverty or hunger. — Fidel Castro

All of us face hard choices in our lives. Some face more than their share. We have to decide how to balance the demands of work and family. Caring for a sick child or an aging parent. Figuring out how to pay for college. Finding a good job, and what to do if you lose it. Whether to get married - or stay married. How to give our kids the opportunities they dream about and deserve. Life is about making such choices. Our choices and how we handle them shape the people we become. For leaders and nations, they can mean the difference between war and peace, poverty and prosperity. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

As long as greed is the root of all evil, there will not be peace.
Get rid of selfishness and greed too will disappear. — Zarina Bibi

It is hard to determine what is most disturbing about this book - the devious and immoral tactics used by leaders and recruiters to get women to join the military, the terrible poverty and personal violence women were escaping that lead them to be vulnerable to such manipulation, the raping and harassing of women soldiers by their superiors and comrades once they got to Iraq, or the untreated homelessness, illnesses and madness that have haunted women since they came home. The Lonely Soldier is an important book, a crucial accounting of the shameful war on women who gave their bodies, lives and souls for their country. — Eve Ensler

I think the Eritrean government is aware that any full-scale invasion of Ethiopia along the lines of 1998 could turn out to be suicidal ... And we will not respond to any provocation short of all-out invasion. We are already engaged in a much more fruitful war - against poverty. — Meles Zenawi

War, poverty, corruption, hunger, misery, human suffering will not change in a monetary system. That is, there will be very little significant change. It's going to take the redesign of our culture and values. — Jacque Fresco

If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort. — Mark Fisher

Can we not wage a war and emerge victorious against poverty. Let us defeat poverty. — Narendra Modi

WAR CHILD is the true story of Magdalena (Leni) Janic whose name appears on The Welcome Wall at Sydney's Darling Harbour. The story spans 100 years starting in pre WWII Nazi Germany and ends in the suburbs of Adelaide. It's a window into what life was like for a young illegitimate German girl growing up in poverty, coping with ostracism, bullying, abuse and dispossession as society was falling down around her and she becomes a refugee. But it's also a story of a woman's unconditional love for her family, the sacrifices she made and secrets she kept to protect them. Her ultimate secret was only revealed in a bizarre twist after her death and much to her daughter's (and author) surprise involved her. A memorable tear-jerker! A sad cruel story told with so much love. — Annette Janic

Religious fanaticism is not the only clear and present danger in our world. The greatest dangers confronting human kind are still those ancient enemies of war, poverty, ignorance and disease. These create the breeding grounds in which religious extremism flourishes, because people who have been betrayed by the world's political and economic systems often seek refuge in the alternatives offered by religion.

It is often said that the most dangerous person in the world is the person with nothing to lose. The more people in our world who have nothing to lose, the greater the danger of extremism is likely to become. If we are committed to struggling against religious fanaticism, and if we really do stand in awe of human potential, then we need to cultivate a much more intelligent debate about the role religion plays in nurturing that human potential through its shaping of ideas and through the hope and meaning it gives to many millions of lives. — Tina Beattie

Dickens had, with all his genius, the narrow short sight of his day and class, sentimental tears for poverty but no vision to remove it except by inviting everybody to be as noble a fellow as himself. War — Stephen Leacock

In times of conflict, war, poverty or religious fundamentalism, women and children are the first and most numerous victims. Women need all their courage today. — Isabel Allende

The world needed changing - that I knew. Global warming threatened to give us all a lethal tan; war and poverty decimated whole nations; crops worldwide were shriveling; even our brethren beasts menaced us with their monkey pox and bird flu and mad cow disease. — Jeff Deck

If people have faith, peace prevails among them. There is no logic for peace. In fact, peace is the most illogical thing in this world. If we see inequality, injustice and poverty around the world, often we think - 'why people don't fight for their rights?' Peace is a miracle, which defies all logic. Political leaders are clever and they destroy peace by inventing logic that creates hatred. Even in war, the logic put forward by both the sides are totally contradictory, and both the sides feel that they are right. — Awdhesh Singh

Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums. Graffiti has more chance of meaning something or changing stuff than anything indoors. Graffiti has been used to start revolutions, stop wars, and generally is the voice of people who aren't listened to. Graffiti is one of those few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make somebody smile while they're having a piss. — Banksy

The civil rights movement didn't deal with the issue of political disenfranchisement in the Northern cities. It didn't deal with the issues that were happening in Northern cities like Detroit, where there was a deep process of deindustrialization going on. So you have this response of angry young people, with a war going on in Vietnam, a poverty program that was insufficient, and police brutality. All these things gave rise to the Black Power Movement. It was not a separation from the civil rights movement, but a continuum of this whole process of democratization. — Danny Glover