Quotations and Poems

» “Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”
– Aristotle

»  ”Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.”
– Walter Bagehot

»  ”Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
– James Baldwin

»  ”The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.”
– John Berger

»  ”A poor man with nothing in his belly needs hope, illusion, more than bread.”
– Georges Bernanos

»  ”Whoever shuts his ears at the cry of the poor, they also shall cry themselves, but not be heard.”
– Bible

»  ”Who ever mocks the poor insults his maker; and he that is glad at calamities shall not go unpunished.”
– Bible

»  ”The poor will always be with you. [John 12: 8]“
– Bible

»  ”He that has pity on the poor lends to the Lord.”
– Bible

»  ”The destruction of the poor is their poverty.”
– Bible

»  ”I am a poor man, but I have this consolation: I am poor by accident, not by design.”
– Josh Billings

»  ”Poverty is the step-mother of genius.”
– Josh Billings

»  ”Remember the poor, it costs nothing.”
– Josh Billings

»  ”To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”
– W. E. B. Du Bois

»  ”The surest way to remain poor is to be an honest man.”
– Napoleon Bonaparte

»  ” Poverty makes you sad as well as wise.”
– Bertolt Brecht

»  ”When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist.”
– Dom H. Camara

»  ”The Poor Man whom everyone speaks of, the Poor Man whom everyone pities, one of the repulsive Poor from whom ”charitable” souls keep their distance, he has still said nothing. Or, rather, he has spoken through the voice of Victor Hugo, Zola, Richepin. At least, they said so. And these shameful impostures fed their authors. Cruel irony, the Poor Man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case.”
– Albert Camus

»  ”There’s a point of poverty at which the spirit isn’t with the body all the time. It finds the body really too unbearable. So it’s almost as if you were talking to the soul itself. And a soul’s not properly responsible.”
–

»  ”The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.”
– Louis-Ferdinand Celine

»  ”The hermit doesn’t sleep at night, in love with the blue of the vacant moon. The cool of the breeze that rustles the trees rustles him too.”
– Ching-An

»  ”To suppose such a thing possible as a society, in which men, who are able and willing to work, cannot support their families, and ought, with a great part of the women, to be compelled to lead a life of celibacy, for fear of having children to be starved; to suppose such a thing possible is monstrous.”
– William Cobbett

»  ”In a country well governed poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed wealth is something to be ashamed of.”
– Confucius

»  ”The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as ”Soho” poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.”
– Quentin Crisp

»  ”To be shelterless and alone in the open country, hearing the wind moan and watching for day through the whole long weary night; to listen to the falling rain, and crouch for warmth beneath the lee of some old barn or rick, or in the hollow of a tree; are dismal things — but not so dismal as the wandering up and down where shelter is, and beds and sleepers are by thousands; a houseless rejected creature.”
– Charles Dickens

»  ”One of the strangest things about life is that the poor, who need the money the most, are the ones that never have it.”
– Finley Peter Dunne

»  ”I have found out in later years that my family was very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it. [On his childhood]“
– Dwight D. Eisenhower

»  ”It is seldom that the miserable of the world can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.”
– George Eliot

»  ”Poverty consist in feeling poor.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

»  ”The greatest man in history was the poorest.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

»  ”There’s no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty.”
– George Farquhar

»  ”I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn’t poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy. I was deprived. (Oh not deprived but rather underprivileged.) Then they told me that underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don’t have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary.”
– Jules Feiffer

»  ”It is a sin to be poor.”
– Charles Fillmore

»  ”We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.”
– Edward M. Forster

»  ”The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor, to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.”
– Anatole France

»  ”I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.”
– Anatole France

»  ”Grant me the treasure of sublime poverty: permit the distinctive sign of our order to be that it does not possess anything of its own beneath the sun, for the glory of your name, and that it have no other patrimony than begging.”
– St. Francis of Assisi

»  ”Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed of it, is.”
– Benjamin Franklin

»  ”Poor men’s reasons are not heard.”
– Thomas Fuller

»  ”Poverty is the worst form of violence.”
– Mahatma Gandhi

»  ”Poverty is uncomfortable; but 9 times out of 10 the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and be compelled to sink or swim.”
– James A. Garfield

»  ”Poverty is uncomfortable; but 9 times out of 10 the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and be compelled to sink or swim.”
– James A. Garfield

»  ”Four specters haunt the Poor — Old Age, Accident, Sickness and Unemployment. We are going to exorcise them. We are going to drive hunger from the hearth. We mean to banish the workhouse from the horizon of every workman in the land.”
– David Lloyd George

»  ”Too poor for a bribe, and too proud to importune, he had not the method of making a fortune.”
– Thomas Gray

»  ”The best way to help poor people is to not be one of them.”
– Bob Harrington

»  ”Poverty in itself does not make men into a rabble; a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the government.”
– Georg Hegel

»  ”You lose your manners when you’re poor.”
– Lillian Hellman

»  ”I want there to be no peasant in my kingdom so poor that he cannot have a chicken in his pot every Sunday.”
– Henry IV

»  ”Poverty must have many satisfactions, else there would not be so many poor people.”
– Don Herold

»  ”Oh, God! that bread should be so dear! And flesh and blood so cheap!”
– Thomas Hood

»  ”In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.”
– Herbert Clark Hoover

»  ”We have not yet reached the goal but.. we shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty shall be banished from this nation.”
– Herbert Clark Hoover

»  ”It is no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.”
– Kin Hubbard

»  ”Do not ask the name of the person who seeks a bed for the night. He who is reluctant to give his name is the one who most needs shelter.”
– Victor Hugo

»  ”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.”
– William James

»  ”It is easy enough to say that poverty is no crime. No; if it were men wouldn’t be ashamed of it. It is a blunder, though, and is punished as such. A poor man is despised the whole world over.”
– Jerome K. Jerome

»  ”Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.”
– Samuel Johnson

»  ”This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed.”
– Samuel Johnson

»  ”Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.”
– Samuel Johnson

»  ”It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.”
– Samuel Johnson

»  ”Poverty is often concealed in splendor, and often in extravagance. It is the task of many people to conceal their neediness from others. Consequently they support themselves by temporary means, and everyday is lost in contriving for tomorrow.”
– Samuel Johnson

»  ”A man who has nothing can whistle in a robber’s face.”
– Decimus Junius Juvenalis Juvenal

»  ”Here we all live in a state of ambitious poverty.”
– Decimus Junius Juvenalis Juvenal

»  ”If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”
– John F. Kennedy

»  ”You don’t seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help.”
– Jean Kerr

»  ”Only in relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction and certainly not in isolation. The movement of behavior is the sure guide to yourself. It’s the mirror of your consciousness: this mirror will reveal its content, the images, the attachments, the fears, the loneliness, the joys and sorrow. Poverty lies in running away from this, either in its sublimations or its identities.”
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

»  ”I wasn’t born in a log cabin, but my family moved into one as soon as they could afford it.”
– Melville D. Landon

»  ”Show me a man with very little money and I will show you a bum.”
– Joe E. Lewis

»  ”Poverty is not the root cause of crime.”
– Rush Limbaugh

»  ”Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.”
– Abraham Lincoln

»  ”Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another.”
– Madonna

»  ”Hard as it may appear in individual cases, dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful.”
– Thomas Robert Malthus

»  ”What power can poverty have over a home where loving hearts are beating with a consciousness of untold riches of the head and heart?”
– Orison Swett Marden

»  ”I know a fellow who’s as broke as the Ten Commandments.”
– John Marquand

»  ”I worked myself up from nothing to extreme poverty.”
– Groucho Marx

»  ”Look at me. I worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.”
– Groucho Marx

»  ”In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?”
– Mary Mccarthy

»  ”He who knows how to be poor knows everything.”
– Jules Michelet

»  ”Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of the mind is irreparable.”
– Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

»  ”The poor would never be able to live at all if it were not for the poor.”
– George Moore

»  ”Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.”
– Mother Teresa

»  ”Our life of poverty is as necessary as the work itself. Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God better because of them.”
– Mother Teresa

»  ”Poverty keeps together more homes than it breaks up.”
– Hector Hugh Munro

»  ”You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money.”
– P. J. O’Rourke

»  ”As society advances the standard of poverty rises.”
– Theodore Parker

»  ”In a change of masters the poor change nothing except their master’s name.”
– Phaedrus

»  ”Poverty of course is no disgrace, but it is damned annoying.”
– William Pitt

»  ”When poverty comes in the door love flies out the window.”
– Proverb

»  ”Poverty has no greater foe than bashfulness.”
– Proverb

»  ”Poverty is not a shame, but the being ashamed of it is.”
– English Proverb

»  ”Painless poverty is better than embittered wealth.”
– Greek Proverb

»  ”Poverty is a wonderful thing. It sticks to a man after all his friends have forsaken him.”
– Hebrew Proverb

»  ”A poor man is all schemes.”
– Spanish Proverb

»  ”If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make a wonderful living.”
– Yiddish Proverb

»  ”True poverty does not come from God.”
– Yiddish Proverb

»  ”The poorest He that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest He.”
– Thomas Raineborough

»  ”What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.”
– Ronald Reagan

»  ”Wealth is conspicuous, but poverty hides.”
– James Reston

»  ”The forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt

»  ”When the rich wage war it is the poor who die.”
– Jean-Paul Sartre

»  ”The rich become richer and the poor become poorer is a cry heard throughout the whole civilized world.”
– Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

»  ”Not he who has little, but he whose wishes more, is poor.”
– Seneca

»  ”There is a noble manner of being poor, and who does not know it will never be rich.”
– Seneca

»  ”O world, how apt the poor are to be proud!”
– William Shakespeare

»  ”The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.”
– George Bernard Shaw

»  ”The seven deadly sins… food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.”
– George Bernard Shaw

»  ”Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.”
– Sydney Smith

»  ”I believe the war on poverty is a more American idea than the war on the war on poverty. I believe that most people feel like that. And I believe that it ain’t over till it’s over.”
– Bruce Springsteen

»  ”America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.”
– Gloria Steinem

»  ”Virtue often trips and falls over the sharp edge of poverty.”
– Eugene Sue

»  ”No one is poor who does not think they are, however, if in prosperity with impatience they desire more, and proclaim their wants they disclose their beggarly condition.”
– Taylor Jeremy

»  ”Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.”
–

»  ”I’ve never been poor, only broke. Being poor is a frame of mind. Being broke is only a temporary situation”
– Mike Todd

»  ”Being broke is a temporary situation. Being poor is a state of mind.”
– Mike Todd

»  ”As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.”
– Raoul Vaneigem

»  ”At present cats have more purchasing power and influence than the poor of this planet. Accidents of geography and colonial history should no longer determine who gets the fish.”
– Derek Wall

»  ”What a devil art thou, Poverty! How many desires — how many aspirations after goodness and truth — how many noble thoughts, loving wishes toward our fellows, beautiful imaginings thou hast crushed under thy heel, without remorse or pause!”
– Walt Whitman

»  ”As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid.”
– Oscar Wilde

»  ”In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilization.”
– Oscar Wilde

»  ”Who, being loved, is poor?”
– Oscar Wilde

»  ”Empty pockets make empty heads.”
– William Carlos Williams

»  ”No man can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach.”
– Woodrow T. Wilson

»  ”I am my brother’s keeper, and he’s sleeping pretty rough these days.”
– Archbishop Derek Worlock