Poverty Quotes

“And makes me poor indeed.”

“Evermore thanks, the exchequer of the poor”

“Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail, And say there is no sin but to be rich; And being rich, my virtue then shall be To say there is no vice but beggary”

“There is an old poor man,. . . . Oppress'd with two weak evils, age and hunger.”

“O world, how apt the poor are to be proud!”

“Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks”

“To have seen much and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and poor hands.”

“I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse: borrowing only lingers and lingers it out, but the disease is incurable.”

“He is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor; and how to give access to themasterpieces of art and nature, is the problem of civilization.”

“Being holiday, the beggar's shop is shut.”

“Government exists to defend the weak and the poor and the injured party; the rich and the strong can better take care of themselves.”

“We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.”

“Poverty demoralizes. A man in debt is so far a slave; and Wall-street thinks it easy for a millionaire to be a man of his word, aman of honor, but, that, in failing circumstances, no man can be relied on to keep his integrity.”

“I see, sir, you are liberal in offers. You taught me first to beg, and now methinks You teach me how a beggar should be answered.”

“When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter into nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hang it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune.”

“The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, andthe country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land,--travel a whole day together,--looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and poor.”

“Then know, that I have little wealth to lose. A man I am, crossed with adversity; My riches are these poor habiliments, Of which if you should here disfurnish me, You take the sum and substance that I have.”

“There's not a shirt and a half in all my company, and the halfshirt is two napkins tacked together and thrown over theshoulders like a herald's coat without sleeves.”

“The poor are only they who feel poor.”

“Wealth and poverty are seen for what they are. It begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel poor, and poverty consists in feeling poor. The rich, as we reckon them, and among them the very rich, in a true scale would be found very indigent and ragged.”

“My father, who was jailed for stealing on more than one occasion, just abandoned his fatherly responsibilities and disappeared. I grew up working from the time I was nine years of age. Money was a big issue everywhere I lived.”

“Care for us! True, indeed! They ne'er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there's all the love they bear us.”

“The main vice of capitalism is the uneven distribution of prosperity. The main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery.”

“Hunger does not breed reform; it breeds madness and all the distemper's that make an ordered life impossible.”

“To all of which is added a selection from the elementary schools of subjects of the most promising genius, whose parents are too poor to give them further education, to be carried at the public expense through the college and university. The object is to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country, for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind, which, in proportion to our population, shall be double or treble of what it is in most countries.”