Poverty Quotes

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

The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible.

A poor man who eats too much, as contradistinguished from a gourmand, who is a rich man who ''lives well.''

We have no paupers ... The great mass of our [United States] population is of laborers; our rich, who can live without labor, either manual or professional, being few, and of moderate wealth. Most of the laboring class possess property, cultivate their own lands, have families, and from the demand for their labor are enabled to exact from the rich and the competent such prices as enable them to be fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families. ... Can any condition of society be more desirable than this?

America is the first country where people go to the poor house in their car.

Poverty is an expensive luxury. We cannot afford it.

I also have in mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.

If all men were rich, all men would be poor.

Ignorance is poverty. Ignorance is pain. I don't want you to go through that. So what I'm trying to do is save you decades of time by bringing you the best.

To give either to any public matter of interest or to any concern of my own, but I am in utter poverty by reason of my devotion to the god .

Where there are millions upon millions of units of idle labour, it is no use thinking of labour-saving devices.

There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer

The most impactful dollars that Australia can spend are actually what goes to help the poorest.

In the world of high finance the shilling of the idle rich man can buy more than that of the poor, industrious man.

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.

There is a solitude in poverty, but a solitude which restores to each thing its value.

If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world. This task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answer this challenge will change the world.

So many of my relatives didn't get a chance to go to school, and my own Daddy couldn't read or write.

Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.

As restrictions and prohibitions are multiplied the people grow poorer and poorer. When they are subjected to overmuch government, the land is thrown into confusion.

Learn all you can, don't be lazy. Nothing's worse than being stupid. Being broke is bad, but being stupid is what's really bad. And what's really really bad is being broke and stupid. Nothing's much worse than that. Unless you're sick. Sick, broke and stupid, that’s about as far as you can fall unless you're ugly. Surely that would be the ultimate; ugly, sick, broke and stupid.

When you cut facilities, slash jobs, abuse power, discriminate, drive people into deeper poverty & shoot people dead whilst refusing to provide answers or justice, the people will rise up & express their anger & frustration if you refuse to hear their cries. A riot is the language of the unheard.

Any strategy to reduce intergenerational poverty has to be centered on work, not welfare--not only because work provides independence and income but also because work provides order, structure, dignity, and opportunities for growth in people's lives.

Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet's dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.

A friend from India told me that a countryman of his said: "I want to go to America. I want to see a country where poor people are fat."

The worst thing about poverty is not the actual living of it, but the shame of it.

It is the poverty connected with our species which subordinates one man to another. It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man's abode.

When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.

Taking all the round of professions and occupations, you will find that every man is the worse for being poor; and the doctor is a specially dangerous man when poor.

You can't help the poor by being one of them.

I went to bed hungry many nights as a child. It was a Dream that dressed me up when I was ragged, and it was a Dream that filled me up when I was hungry. Now it's my Dream to see that no child in this world ever goes hungry, certainly not here in America, the most bountiful country in the world. We can do better...we must!

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.

For desert, maybe we can split a couple of crumbs.

Give to a being the useless, and deprive him of the needful, and you have the gamin.

Journalists are too poorly paid in this country to know anything that is fit for publication.

We have so many issues today that we need to confront. Comprehensive immigration reform. We have to solve the issue of poverty, the issue of hunger, the issue of war - spending billions of dollars to kill rather than to build. We have to deal with the fact that all of our children should be receiving the best possible education.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

Improving the health & productivity of the poorest is one of the best investments you can make in the future of the world

There should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor again excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil.

I've never seen a homeless guy with a bottle of Gatorade.

The poor and ignorant will continue to lie and steal as long as the rich and educated show them how.

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.

Now the baby's in the trash heap balling.

While poverty persists, there is no true freedom.

I would ask you to come in Khadi, for Khadi links you with the fallen and the down-trodden.

Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.

We are weak, please let us in. We're week, please let us in." After about a week tha song is gonna change to, "We're hungry, we need some food." After two, three weeks it's like "Give me some of tha food! I'm breakin down tha door." After a year it's like, "I'm pickin' the lock, comin' through the door blastin." It's like, "I'm hungry.

I had a very depressing response because I realized that these were my own people, these were Negroes throwing eggs at me. I'm concerned about the fact that maybe all of us have contributed to this by not working harder to get rid of the conditions, the poverty, the social isolation, and all of the conditions that cause individuals to respond like this.

I must dissent emphatically from any proposal to spend any money on preparing a statue of me, more especially at a time when people do not have enough food and clothing.

The full man does not understand the wants of the hungry

Hand-spinning is designed to put millions of rupees in the hands of the poor villagers.

The most sublime courage I have ever witnessed has been among that class too poor to know they possessed it, and too humble for the world to discover it.

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.

And one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.

Wealth and rank are what men desire, but unless they be obtained in the right way they may not be possessed. Poverty and obscurity are what men detest; but unless prosperity be brought about in the right way, they are not to be abandoned.

But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said. "There is noth-ing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes tocondemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!

Poverty is not natural; it is man-made