Child Poverty Quotes

“Is this a holy thing to see,
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery,
Feed with cold and usurous hand?

Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!

And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak & bare,
And their ways are fill'd with thorns;
It is eternal winter there.

For where-e'er the sun does shine,
And where-e'er the rain does fall,
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.”
― William Blake, Songs of Experience

“The first step toward better policy is to amend our understanding of people's struggles so that it is less about individual irresponsibility and more about our collective irresponsibility in tolerating levels of child poverty that would be unacceptable in the rest of the developed world.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“The National Academies of Sciences, Medicine and Engineering, tasked by Congress with investigating how to reduce child poverty in the United States, issued a landmark report in 2019 that concluded that each year child poverty costs Americans about $1 trillion in crime, education and welfare costs and related expenses.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“For a nation that frequently proclaims its love for children, we act in a very strange way. Yes, we love our own children, but often caring about other children is a different matter. America is one of the wealthiest nations on earth, and yet we are the first modern industrial nation to have made children our principal underclass. More than one-fifth of our children live in poverty. How do we expect a bright economic future for this nation when we are willing to discard twenty percent of that future?”
― Bob Keeshan, Good Morning, Captain: Fifty Wonderful Years with Bob Keeshan, TV's Captain Kangaroo