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I know what poverty is.

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.

When you're poor, you know nothing about the future, you know nothing about the world, nothing that goes on outside 300 yards around you.

I experienced firsthand what it means to be poor, what it means to go hungry, and that, I think, may be the reason, the root cause of why I'm able to work so hard, even these days.

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.

A common measure of poverty is how much money you have in relation to other people - that is useful as far as it goes, but that excludes the case of, say, a hunter in the rainforest who has no money but is not poor. And there can be a number of people with money but who can consider themselves unwanted or invisible or estranged from society.

There is a noble manner of being poor, and who does not know it will never be rich.

When poverty shows itself, even mischievous boys understand what it means.

Prosperity is a way of living and thinking, and not just money or things. Poverty is a way of living and thinking, and not just a lack of money or things.

Poverty makes you wise but it's a curse.