That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
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.
Wealth is conspicuous, but poverty hides.
The worst part of great poverty is that you become blind to it.
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.
Poverty is about people lacking the tools they need to get on in life. And solving it is about tackling educational failure, antisocial behaviour, debt problems and addiction, and of course it's about work.
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.
The poor are an especially important resource for innovation when they have the bravery and pluck to get out of the poor places in which they're living.
In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.
The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.