Quotes about poverty-and-the-poor

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

The poor will always be with you. [John 12: 8]

— Bible

The destruction of the poor is their poverty.

— Bible

He that has pity on the poor lends to the Lord.

— Bible

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

Poverty is the step-mother of genius.

— Josh Billings

Remember the poor, it costs nothing.

— Josh Billings

I am a poor man, but I have this consolation: I am poor by accident, not by design.

— 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.

— Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.

— John W. Gardner

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

That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.

— Michael 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

This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed.

— 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

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

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

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

— Samuel Johnson

Here we all live in a state of ambitious poverty.

— (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) Juvenal

A man who has nothing can whistle in a robber's face.

— (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) Juvenal

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

Poor is the man who does not know his own intrinsic worth and tends to measure everything by relative value. A man of financial wealth who values himself by his financial net worth is poorer than a poor man who values himself by his intrinsic self worth.

— Sidney Madwed

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

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