318 Poverty Quotes

How the sting of poverty, or small means, is gone when one keeps house for one's own comfort and not for the comfort of one's neighbors.

Wealthy men can't live in an island that is encircled by poverty. We all breathe the same air. We must give a chance to everyone, at least a basic chance.

I believe the war on poverty is a more American idea than the war on the war on poverty. I believe that most people feel like that. And I believe that it ain't over till it's over.

It's going to be really interesting to see what the heroin market does in the next two years or so. One thing you can be pretty sure of. The Afghan peasants who grow poppies won't get rich. The money will end up in places like Dubai.

We still leave unblotted in the leaves of our statute book, for the reverence and admiration of successive ages, the just and wholesome law which declares that the sturdy felon shall be fed and clothed, and that the penniless debtor shall be left to die of starvation and nakedness. This is no fiction.

Do you know what the good side of crack is? If you're up at the right hour, you can get a VCR for $1.50. You can furnish your whole house for $10.95.

If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth. When the means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed; extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare.

What a hell of an economic system! Some are replete with everything while others, whose stomachs are no less demanding, whose hunger is just as recurrent, have nothing to bite on. The worst of it is the constrained posture need puts you in. The needy man does not walk like the rest; he skips, slithers, twists, crawls.

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

In the Third World, there are 1.3 billion poor people. In other words, one out of every three inhabitants lives in poverty.

More than 820 million people in the world suffer from hunger; and 790 million of them live in the Third World.

The great question for our time is, how to make sure that the continuing scientific revolution brings benefits to everybody rather than widening the gap between rich and poor. To lift up poor countries, and poor people in rich countries, from poverty, to give them a chance of a decent life, technology is not enough. Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.

I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes.

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.

I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.

I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich.

I come fresh from the street, fast on my feet, kind a lean and lazy; not much meat on my bones, and a whole lot alone, and more than a little bit crazy. The old six string was all I had to keep my belly still, and for each full hour lesson I gave I got a crisp ten dollar bill.

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.

To bear many children is considered not only a religious blessing but also an investment. The greater their number, some Indians reason, the more alms they can beg.

Poverty is uncomfortable; but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim.

Hospitality still survives among foreigners, although it is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans.

Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited.

If you're totally illiterate and living on one dollar a day, the benefits of globalization never come to you.

The poor folk gladly came to me, for I did them no unkindness, but helped them as much as I could.

One must always have in mind one simple fact - there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.

Boileau said that Kings, Gods and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires. Present-day kings aren't very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor.

Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.

Everywhere, and at all times, economic progress has meant far more to the poor than to the rich.

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.

At stake are two different visions of faith, the Church of Caesar, powerful and rich; and the Church of Christ - loving, poor and spiritually rich.

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

Rich kids gave us their old clothes. They were the best clothes we ever had. We were these very pure, naive, poor children. The rich kids called us a lot of names but it never bothered us because we didn't know what the words meant.

I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.

To him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth.

Born in a cellar, and living in a garret.

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.

I consciously choose the dog's path through life. I shall be poor; I shall be a painter...

Poverty is an anomaly to rich people; it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.

The people are starving. They need food; they need medicine; they need education. They do not need a skyscraper to house the ruling party and a 24-hour TV station.

I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now.

If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don't care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.

A dog starved at his master's gate Predicts the ruin of the state.

No man can be a patriot on an empty stomach.

I saw rich beggars and poor beggars, proud beggars and humble beggars, fat beggars and thin beggars, healthy beggars and sick beggars, whole beggars and crippled beggars, wise beggars and stupid beggars. I saw amateur beggars and professional beggars. A professional beggar is a beggar who begs for a living.

And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food.

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

Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.

That is why no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation. Now the Tories are pouring out money in propaganda of all sorts and are hoping by this organised sustained mass suggestion to eradicate from our minds all memory of what we went through. But, I warn you young men and women, do not listen to what they are saying now. Do not listen to the seductions of Lord Woolton. He is a very good salesman. If you are selling shoddy stuff you have to be a good salesman. But I warn you they have not changed, or if they have they are slightly worse than they were.

We got so much food in America we're allergic to food. Allergic to food! Hungry people ain't allergic to shit. You think anyone in Rwanda's got a fucking lactose intolerance?!

The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility.

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.

'Real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind.'

'The first priority of any serious program against poverty is to strengthen the male role in poor families.'

The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

When I was a beggarly boy, And lived in a cellar damp, I had not a friend nor a toy, But I had Aladdin's lamp.

The Settlement ... is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other ...

I attacked those Western playwrights who use their influence and affluence to preach to the world the nihilistic doctrine that life is pointless and irrationally destructive, and that there is nothing we can do about it. Until everyone is fed, clothed, housed and taught, until human beings have equal leisure to contemplate the overwhelming fact of mortality, we should not (I argued) indulge in the luxury of 'privileged despair.'

The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.

The Rich must live more simply so that the Poor may simply live.

The lack of money is the root of all evil.

I've always been after the trappings of great luxury. But all I've got hold of are the trappings of great poverty. I've got hold of the wrong load of trappings, and a rotten load they are too, ones I could have very well done without.

Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, and poverty of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.

Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Give a man a sub-prime fish loan and you're in business, buddy.

I know so well what becomes of unmarried women who aren't prepared to occupy a position. I've seen such pitiful cases in the South - barely tolerated spinsters living upon the grudging patronage of sister's husband or brother's wife! - stuck away in some little mouse-trap of a room - encouraged by one in-law to visit another - little birdlike women without any nest - eating the crust of humility all their life! Is that the future that we've mapped out for ourselves?

'Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.'

Too poor for a bribe, and too proud to importune, He had not the method of making a fortune.

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll; Chill Penury repressed their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul.

So please don't think that I am renouncing anything, I am reasonably faithful in my unfaithfulness and though I have changed, I am the same, and what preys on my mind is simply this one question: what am I good for, could I not be of service or use in some way, how can I become more knowledgeable and study some subject or other in depth? That is what keeps preying on my mind, you see, and then one feels imprisoned by poverty, barred from taking part in this or that project and all sorts of necessities are out of one's reach. As a result one cannot rid oneself of melancholy, one feels emptiness where there might have been friendship and sublime and genuine affection, and one feels dreadful disappointment gnawing at one's spiritual energy, fate seems to stand in the way of affection or one feels a wave of disgust welling up inside. And then one says 'How long, my God!'

How the sting of poverty, or small means, is gone when one keeps house for one's own comfort and not for the comfort of one's neighbors.

Give a beggar a dime and he'll bless you. Give him a dollar and he'll curse you for witholding the rest of your fortune. Poverty is a bag with a hole at the bottom.

I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.

To raise the standard of living of the whole world to that of Britain would not be a greater undertaking than the war we have just fought. I don't claim, and I don't know who does, that that wouldn't solve anything in itself. It is merely that privation and brute labour have to be abolished before the real problems of humanity can be tackled. The major problem of our time is the decay of the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police. How right the working classes are in their 'materialism'! How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time! Understand that, and the long horror that we are enduring becomes at least intelligible.

It's not a matter of whether the war is not real, or if it is, Victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact.

But nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches, as to conceive how others can be in want.

It's no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.

I tell my sons they didn't have my advantages growing up. I came from abject poverty. There was nowhere to go but up.

'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,' grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. 'It's so dreadful to be poor!' sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress. 'I don't think it's fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all,' added little Amy, with an injured sniff. 'We've got Father and Mother, and each other,' said Beth contentedly from her corner. The four young faces on which the firelight shone brightened at the cheerful words, but darkened again as Jo said sadly, 'We haven't got Father, and shall not have him for a long time.' She didn't say 'perhaps never,' but each silently added it, thinking of Father far away, where the fighting was.

Money can't buy poverty. [3]

'It is a sad fact that on this earth at this late date there are still two worlds, 'the privileged world' and 'the forgotten world'. The privileged world consists of the affluent, developed nations, comprising twenty-five to thirty percent of the world population, in which most of the people live in a luxury never before experienced by man outside the Garden of Eden. The forgotten world is made up primarily of the developing nations, where most of the people, comprising more than fifty percent of the total world population, live in poverty, with hunger as a constant companion and fear of famine a continual menace.'

It [LSD] opened my eyes. We only use one-tenth of our brain. Just think of what we could accomplish if we could only tap that hidden part! It would mean a whole new world if the politicians would take LSD. There wouldn't be any more war or poverty or famine.

Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?