You can't not be changed by the experience of seeing extreme poverty. You start to want to think about ways in which you can make the world better.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I myself am from a very poor background; I experienced firsthand poverty in this country, and that is not unrelated to my desire, from the moment I became president, to make a priority of poverty reduction in this country.
I've experienced poverty and plenty, and there's a lesson to be learned when you're brought up in poverty.
The worst part of great poverty is that you become blind to it.
Poverty is an artificial, external imposition on a human being; it is not innate in a human being. And since it is external, it can be removed. It is just a question of doing it.
I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.
As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.
You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.
It's hard for me to understand how poverty can be invisible to so many people, since I see it everywhere. Readers sometimes think this world is so different; on the one hand, they feel connected to the people I'm writing about, and on the other hand, they're saying their lives are a world away.
You almost have to create situations in order to write about them, so I live in a constant state of self-imposed poverty. I don't want to live any other way.
If you're raised with a poverty mentality, nothing is going to change it. I do know some really stingy billionaires. I come from such a generation of hand-to-mouthers.