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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.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

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.

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 believe that poverty is often the result of inappropriate behavior - out-of-wedlock births, dropping out of school, crime and drugs - which should not be rewarded. But often it isn't, and common decency requires that we take care of the least of these.

Poverty itself is not so bad as the poverty thought. It is the conviction that we are poor and must remain so that is fatal.

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.

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.

We have mistaken the nature of poverty, and thought it was economic poverty. No, it is poverty of soul, deprivation of God's recreating, loving peace.

It is easy enough to say that poverty is no crime. No; if it were men wouldn't be ashamed of it. It is a blunder, though, and is punished as such. A poor man is despised the whole world over.