Africa’s progress will depend on development that truly lifts countries from poverty to prosperity -- because people everywhere deserve the dignity of a life free from want.
It is said that the children of the very poor are not brought up, but dragged up.
Poor pensioner on the bounties of an hour.
I care for riches, to make gifts With hunger, rich and poor are all as one.
I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes.
— George Bernard Shaw
Social Justice
I ask you, what am I? I’m one of the undeserving poor: thats what I am. Think of what that means to a man.
— George Bernard Shaw
Poverty
The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people — people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from normal standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words.
I am trying to describe the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all part of the story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some idea of what life was like there.
For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.