Selected poverty quotes

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

2. 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.

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

4. If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution.

5. Come away; poverty's catching.

6. Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.

7. 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.

8. If all you boast of your great art be true; Sure, willing poverty lives most in you.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. Please, sir, I want some more.

13. It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. 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.

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

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

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

20. 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.

21. Lack of money is the root of all evil.

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

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

24. 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.

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

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

27. 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.

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

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

30. 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.

31. 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.

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

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

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

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

36. 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.

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

38. 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.

39. 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.

40. 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.

41. Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of women is responsible for prostitution.

42. I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.

43. Diamond, however, had not been out so late before in all his life, and things looked so strange about him! - just as if he had got into Fairyland, of which he knew quite as much as anybody; for his mother had no money to buy books to set him wrong on the subject.

44. Interea non cessant uncinata nudorum tela, quibus miserrimi cives de muris tracti solo allidebantur.

45. I've worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.

46. You cannot feed the hungry on statistics.

47. Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men -the balance wheel of the social machinery... It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich; it prevents being poor.

48. I used to look at homeless peopleand try to imagine what they had once looked like. It's not easy. Beneath the grime and degradation is a face once adored by someone. It's a truth that tricks the eye; our glances slide away. But something happened to ruin that life, to strip it bare; and it was something small, something that but for the grace of God could take us, too.

49. In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest-usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation-and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside.

50. At my house dinner easily could have consisted of a bologna sandwich, and then you'd split. You might come back later and grab a few peanuts, and then you'd split again. That was it. I would go to my buddy Sal's house for dinner. I couldn't understand what was going on with everyone sitting down together. I'll never forget seeing romaine lettuce for the first time. I thought it was weird - I was afraid of it. There was salad and appetizers and soup. I had no idea about that. I grew up on hillbilly food. (2004)

51. O esforco humano consegue, quando muito, converter um proletariado faminto numa burguesia farta; mas surge logo das entranhas da sociedade um proletariado pior. Jesus tinha razao: havera sempre pobres entre nos. Donde se prova que esta humanidade e o maior erro que jamais Deus cometeu.

52. We light the oven so that everyone may bake bread in it. If I survive, I will spend my whole life at the oven door seeing that no one is denied bread and, so as to give a lesson of charity, especially those who did not bring flour.

53. The great problem of our civilization is still unsolved. We have to account for and grapple with the mass of misery and destitution in our midst, co-existent as it is with the evidence of abundant wealth and teeming prosperity. It is a problem which some men would put aside by reference to the eternal laws of supply and demand, to the necessity of freedom of contract, and to the sanctity of every private right of property...Our object is the elevation of the poor, of the masses of the people-a levelling up of them by which we shall do something to remove the excessive inequality in social life.

54. 'You know the best medicine go to people thats payed/If Magic Johnson got a cure for AIDS and all the broke motherfuckers passed away/ You tellin me if my grandma's in the NBA, right now she would be ok?/ But since she was just a secretary workin' for the church for thirty-five years/things supposed to stop right here?'

55. I get guilty when I spend money on silly things like clothes and stuff... Having experienced a completely different extreme of wealth, and I don't mean me being poor or rich, I mean knowing that 40 quid that gets spent on a pair of shoes could go a long way for a family in Georgia for a week or even a month, having experienced that, you're a bit more [guilty].

56. Everything in religion should be gratuitous, and for the people; care must be taken not to deprive the poor... of the only thing which consoles them for their poverty.

57. The surest way to remain poor is to be an honest man.

58. We live with the hope that as she battles to remake herself, South Africa, will be like a microcosm of the new world that is striving to be born. This must be a world of democracy and respect for human rights, a world freed from the horrors of poverty, hunger, deprivation and ignorance, relieved of the threat and the scourge of civil wars and external aggression and unburdened of the great tragedy of millions forced to become refugees.

59. 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.

60. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

61. Such dainties to them, their health it might hurt; It's like sending them ruffles, when wanting a shirt.

62. Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

63. A man he was to all the country dear, And passing rich with forty pounds a year.

64. Thou source of all my bliss, and all my woe, That found'st me poor at first, and keep'st me so.

65. What makes community organizing especially attractive is the faith it places in the ability of the poor to make decisions for themselves.

66. What the poor, the weak, and the inarticulate desperately require is power, organization, and a sense of identity and purpose, not rarefied advice of political scientists.

67. Hunger makes a thief of any man.

68. Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.

69. When a third wave of poverty overwhelmed me, I knew with even greater certitude than when I lived in Clerkenwell that the only complete solution to my problems was suicide. I never brought it off. I was afraid... Hopelessness was thinly spread like a drizzle over my whole outlook. But, in an emergency, I could not find a puddle of despondency deep enough to drown in.

70. Affluence separates people. Poverty knits 'em together. You got some sugar and I don't; I borrow some of yours. Next month you might not have any flour; well, I'll give you some of mine.

71. People who go broke in a big way never miss any meals. It is the poor jerk who is shy a half slug who must tighten his belt.

72. Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded - here and there, now and then - are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as 'bad luck.'

73. I despise a stingy man. I do not see how it is possible for a man to die worth fifty million of dollars, or ten million of dollars, in a city full of want, when he meets almost every day the withered hand of beggary and the white lips of famine. How a man can withstand all that, and hold in the clutch of his greed twenty or thirty million of dollars, is past my comprehension. I do not see how he can do it.

74. With one hand he put A penny in the urn of poverty, And with the other took a shilling out.

75. The do-good liberal who said we have to take care of everybody -- and they are well intentioned -- the more debt they run up to give to the poor, the poorer the people get because they cannot keep up.

76. The pleasures of the mighty are obtained by the tears of the poor.

77. I fear my own conscience on Africa. I fear the judgement of future generations, where history properly calculates the gravity of the suffering. I fear them asking: but how could wealthy people, so aware of such suffering, so capable of acting, simply turn away to busy themselves with other things? What greater call to action could there be? Did they really know and yet do nothing? I feel that judgement of the future alongside the now. It gives me urgency. It fills me with determination.

78. I wrote with tears and anguish, pouring into the pages all that pain which life had meant to me. Externally the story had to do with a family of stockyard workers, but internally it was the story of my own family. Did I wish to know how the poor suffered in winter time in Chicago? I only had to recall the previous winter in the cabin, when we had only cotton blankets, and had rags on top of us. It was the same with hunger, with illness, with fear. Our little boy was down with pneumonia that winter, and nearly died, and the grief of that went into the book.

79. Before comfort had been squeezed out of the hard land, like blood out of stone.

80. A l'heure, si sombre encore, de la civilisation ou nous sommes, le miserable s'appelle L'HOMME; il agonise sous tous les climats, et il gemit dans toutes les langues.

81. Italiens ou francais, la misere nous regarde tous. Depuis que l'histoire ecrit et que la philosophie medite, la misere est le vetement du genre humain; le moment serait enfin venu d'arracher cette guenille, et de remplacer, sur les membres nus de l'Homme-Peuple, la loque sinistre du passe par la grande robe pourpre de l'aurore.

82. The worker is becoming impoverished absolutely, i.e., he is actually becoming poorer than before; he is compelled to live worse, to eat worse, to suffer hunger more, and to live in basements and attics.

83. Poor indeed must thou be, if around thee Thou no ray of light and joy canst throw-

84. 'What does peace mean in a world in which the combined wealth of the world's 587 billionaires exceeds the combined gross domestic product of the world's 135 poorest countries? Or when rich countries that pay farm subsidies of a billion dollars a day, try and force poor countries to drop their subsidies? What does peace mean to people in occupied Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir, Tibet and Chechnya? Or to the aboriginal people of Australia? Or the Ogoni of Nigeria? Or the Kurds in Turkey? Or the Dalits and Adivasis of India?What does peace mean to non-muslims in Islamic countries, or to women in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan? What does it mean to the millions who are being uprooted from their lands by dams and development projects? What does peace mean to the poor who are being actively robbed of their resources and for whom everyday life is a grim battle for water, shelter, survival and, above all, some semblance of dignity? For them, peace is war.'

85. As one looks at the millions of acres in this country that have been taken out of agricultural production; and at the millions of additional acres that have never been cultivated; and at the millions of people who have moved off the farm to rot and decay in the ghettoes of our big cities; and at all the millions of hungry people at home and abroad; does it not seem that all these people and things were somehow made to come together and serve one another? If we could bring them together, we could stem the mass exodus of rural poor to the big city ghettoes and start it going back the other way; teach them how to operate new farm equipment; and put them to work on those now uncultivated acres to raise food for the hungry. If a way could be found to do this, there would be not only room but positive need for still more machinery and still more productivity increase. There would be enough employment, wages, profits, food and fiber.

86. In this country - the most favored beneath the bending skies - we have vast areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery to produce in abundance for every man, woman, and child - and if there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue and lulls these hapless victims to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity: