#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.”

“Ne'er ask me what raiment I'll wear, for I have no more doublets than backs, no more stockings than legs, nor no more shoes than feet--nay, sometime more feet than shoes, or such shoes as my toes look through the overleather.”

“The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hands.”

“There is no income tax in Russia. But there's no income.”

“If your Income Taxes go to help out the less fortunate, there could be no legitimate kick against it in the world. This is becoming the richest, and the poorest Country in the world. Why? Why, on account of an unequal distribution of the money.”

“I grew up in the east side of Detroit in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. I never woke up saying, 'I'm an orphan again today, isn't this terrible? Poor me.'”

“I'd find the fellow who lost it [million dollars], and, if he was poor, I'd return it.”

“We are the first nation in the history of the world to go to the poorhouse in an automobile.”

“The president says, 'There is lots of people worse off than the Farmers.' I don't know who it could be unless it is the fellow who holds the Mortgages on the Farms.”

“Poverty consist in feeling poor.”

“We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly - the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape.”

“We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition”

“It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There must be thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman.”

“Ten men in our country could buy the whole world and ten million can't buy enough to eat.”

“The nation is prosperous on the whole, but how much prosperity is there in a hole?”

“Prosperity this Winter is going to be enjoyed by everybody that is fortunate enough to get into the poor farm.”

“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.”

“The poor have very few hours in which to enjoy themselves; they must take their pleasure raw; they haven't the time to cook it.”

“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.”

“But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

“The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.”

“That's the trouble with our charities; we are always saving somebody away off, when the fellow next to us ain't eating.”

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

“No man can be condemned for owning a dog. As long as he has a dog, he has a friend; and the poorer he gets, the better friend he has.”

“There is one rule that works in every calamity. Be it pestilence, war, or famine, the rich get richer and poor get poorer. The poor even help arrange it.”

“I did have a lot of lack, but I never experienced it. I grew up in the east side of Detroit, in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. Even growing up in an orphanage, I never woke up saying, "I'm an orphan again today, isn't this terrible? Poor me."”