Traditionally the great men of our country have sprung from poor environments; that being so, it would appear we have long suffered from a severe lack of poverty.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It is not easy for men to rise whose qualities are thwarted by poverty.
Poverty is not the simple result of bad geography, bad culture, bad history. It's the result of us: of the ways that people choose to organize their societies.
The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.
Poverty is not inevitable. It is a human ill that we can fight if we decide to do so together.
It is not poverty so much as pretense that harasses a ruined man - the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse - the keeping up of a hollow show that must soon come to an end.
Ours is not a poor country and even though we are now a poor people, there should be no room for the despondency that has settled on large sections of the population.
Wealthy men can't live in an island that is encircled by poverty. We all breathe the same air. We must give a chance to everyone, at least a basic chance.
I've experienced poverty and plenty, and there's a lesson to be learned when you're brought up in poverty.
This is not a country that has had a tremendous sympathy for poor people, so I think that the notion that somehow we have slipped into an era in which poor people don't matter is not quite the way our history would define it.