“I believe in microfinance because it isn't just a path out of poverty. It's the road to self-reliance. By allowing people to team up and literally become their own bank, you can mobilize people and resources and alleviate poverty on the global scale.”

“Many individuals are capable of creating wealth but are excluded from the job market by minimum wage and licensing laws. Much poverty can be alleviated by allowing people to create wealth at whatever level they can and ‘work their way up.’”

“We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.”

“A great measure of world poverty today and African poverty in particular is due to the continuing dependence on foreign markets for manufactured goods, which undermines domestic production and dams up domestic skills, apart from piling up unmanageable foreign debts. Gandhi's insistence on self-sufficiency is a basic economic principle that, if followed today, could contribute significantly to alleviating Third World poverty and stimulating development.”

“Attacking the rich is not envy. It is self defense. The hoarding of wealth is the cause of poverty. The rich aren’t just indifferent to poverty; they create it and maintain it.”

“I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil. Government belongs wherever evil needs an adversary and there are people in distress.”

“Food poverty comes in two strands. The first is not having enough money to buy food for yourself and your family. The second is poverty of education. If you give someone £20 and say, 'Feed your family for the week on it,' a lot of people just couldn't do it adequately and that's because there's – and I do blame the readymeal industry for it, because it is so easy and so attractively packaged, and you just put it in a microwave – a disconnection between what's in that packet, and how simple and cheap it might be to make it for yourself. I think if we can solve food education then we are part of the way to solving food poverty.”

“Decoupling growth from environmental degradation is the number one challenge facing governments in a world of rising numbers of people, rising incomes, rising consumption demands and the persistent challenge of poverty alleviation.”

“To be a star is~to own the world and all the people in it. After a taste of stardom, everything else is poverty.”

“It is now becoming recognised in all parts of the world that there can be no healthy Christian State, in any country, where poverty exists amongst the masses of the people.”