"Sometimes the poor are praised for being..." - Quote by Oscar Wilde
Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
More by Oscar Wilde
“If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.”
“It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.”
“For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.”
More on Poverty
“I call the Lancashire trade immoral, because it was raised and is sustained on the ruin of millions of India's peasants.”
“Public money ought to be touched with the most scrupulous conscientiousness of honor. It is not the produce of riches only, but of the hard earnings of labor and poverty. It is drawn even from the bitterness of want and misery. Not a beggar passes, or perishes in the streets, whose mite is not in that mass.”
“The lower the family income, the higher the probability that the mother must work. Today, 1 out of 5 of these working mothers has children under 3. Two out of 5 have children of school age. Among the remainder, about 50 percent have husbands who earn less than $5,000 a year-many of them much less. I believe they bear the heaviest burden of any group in our Nation. Where the mother is the sole support of the family, she often must face the hard choice of either accepting public assistance or taking a position at a pay rate which averages less than two-thirds of the pay rate for men.”
More on Wealth
“Wealth is measured by the level of experience in all aspects of life”
“I used to have lots of tigers. I had all sorts of exotic pets when I had some money. Before I was broke, I had everything. Pigeons and vultures, lions, tigers, and bears. I had it all.”
“Both poverty and wealth, therefore, have a bad effect on the quality of the work and the workman himself. Wealth and poverty, I answered. One produces luxury and idleness and a passion for novelty, the other meanness and bad workmanship and revolution into the bargain.”