Poverty Quotes

‎Honoured sir, poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkeness is not a virtue, and that's even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary--never--no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, forasmuch as in beggary as I am ready to be the first to humiliate myself.

Have you no morals, man?' 'Can't afford them,Governor.

Without denying the value of scientific endeavor, there is a striking absurdity in committing billions to reach the moon where no people live, while only a fraction of that amount is appropriated to service the densely populated slums.

For me the only point that has remained unchanged through the years is that in India there is still so much poverty.

Oppression is often the consequence, but seldom or never the means of riches; and tho' avarice will preserve a man from being necessitously poor, it generally makes him too timorous to be wealthy.

Where do people get off saying the Beatles should give $200,000,000 to South America? You know, America has poured billions into places like that. It doesn't mean a damn thing. After they've eaten that meal, then what? It lasts for only a day. After the $200,000,000 is gone, then what? It goes round and round in circles. You can pour money in forever. After Peru, then Harlem, then Britain. There is no one concert. We would have to dedicate the rest of our lives to one world concert tour, and I'm not ready for it. Not in this lifetime, anyway.

The way the [welfare] programs are organized, poor people are only paid to do things that are counter-productive - such as breaking up their families, such as not earning above a certain level of income.

Truly, whoever possesses little is that much less possessed: praised be a little poverty!

We have no poor houses in the Colonies, and if we had, we would have no one to put in them, as in the Colonies there is not a single unemployed man, no poor and no vagabonds.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age.

Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house.

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.

Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million.

Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood.

Child poverty in the United States declined after the work requirement was put in there. People realized that they had to work and people went out and worked and they got off welfare.

Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.

The spinning wheel and the spinning wheel alone will solve, if anything will solve, the problem of the deepening poverty of India.

To constrain the brute force of the people, the European governments deem it necessary to keep them down by hard labor, poverty and ignorance, and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings, as that unremitting labor shall be necessary to obtain a sufficient surplus to sustain a scanty and miserable life.

It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.

We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well that was probably true. They were all on a diet.

As long as many of our people still live in utter poverty, as long as children still live under plastic covers, as long as many of our people are still without jobs, no South African should rest and wallow in the joy of freedom.

If the poor boy cannot come to education,education must go to him

Indeed, the test of orderliness in a country is not the number of millionaires it owns, but the absence of starvation among its masses.

What is left of the poor? Try to buy a fresh f**king vegetable in West Baltimore. It is a not completely inconceivable scenario in the future, we'll all look like that... Waddling from convenience store to fast food outlet, chewing mindlessly on 99 cent hamburgers.

Every effort therefore must be made to perpetuate prosperity. And, since that is to the advantage of the rich as well as the poor, all that accrues from the revenues should be collected into a single fund and distributed in block grants to those in need, if possible in lump sums large enough for the acquisition of a small piece of land, but if not, enough to start a business, or work in agriculture. And if that cannot be done for all, the distribution might be by tribes or some other division each in turn.

No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.

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

When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.

In those days, there was no money to buy books.

There are many people in South Africa who are rich and who can share those riches with those not so fortunate who have not been able to conquer poverty.

A lot of my own relatives didn't get to go to school because we were mountain people. You have to get out and work and help feed the family. My own dad couldn't read and write. And my dad was very proud of me.

The poor man must walk to get meat for his stomach,the rich man to get a stomach to his meat.

Those who either from imprudence or want of sagacity avoid doing so, are always overwhelmed with servitude and poverty; for faithful servants are always servants, and honest men are always poor; nor do any ever escape from servitude but the bold and faithless, or from poverty, but the rapacious and fraudulent.

In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there's such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success.

If it were (Is it not) outrageous that society should treat with such rigid precision those of its members who were most poorly endowed in the distribution or wealth that chance had made, and who were, therefore, most worthy of indulgence.

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.

The flower-girl's prayer to buy roses and pinks, held out in the smoke, like stars by day.

We have to prove to the disinherited majority of the world that ecology and conservation will not work against their interest but will bring an improvement in their lives.

Think! I've got enough to do, and little enough to get for it, without thinking.

You know I have loved him always. But we are very poor. Who, being loved, is poor? Oh, no one. I hate my riches. They are a burden.

For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

Poverty makes people sub-human Excess of wealth makes people inhuman

The bottom line on the Hyde Amendment is that it is directly, in effect, targeting poor women and women who don't have money.

Being in Marin City was like a small town so it taught me to be more [straightforward] with my style. Instead of of being so metaphorical with the rhyme, I was encouraged to go straight at it and hit it dead on and not waste time trying to cover thingsIn Marin City it seemed like things were real country. Everything was straightforward. Poverty was straightforward.

The forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

It is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork.

We were poor when I was young but the difference was that the government didn't come around telling you you were poor.

When asked what was the proper time for supper: If you are a rich man, whenever you please; and if you are a poor man, whenever you can.

The rich want good wine, the poor, plenty of wine

Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?

What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can't afford to buy a hamburger?

For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.

The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede.

One is only poor, only if they choose to be.

Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man you have seen, and ask yourself if this step you contemplate is going to be any use to him.

I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.

The people are hungry: It is because those in authority eat up too much in taxes.

Is the rich world aware of how four billion of the six billion live? If we were aware, we would want to help out, we'd want to get involved.

Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.