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I've never experienced chronic poverty, but I know what it's like to live on £3 a week.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

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.

For those who are able to work, work has to be seen as the best route out of poverty. For work is not just about more money - it is transformative. It's about taking responsibility for yourself and your family.

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.

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.

The burden of poverty isn't just that you don't always have the things you need, it's the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you'd do anything to lift that burden.

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.

Maybe poverty is a special case of something else. That something else is 'scarcity,' and anyone who has the experience of 'having very little' experiences the same psychology.