Poverty Quotes

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

Poverty is taking your children to the hospital and spending the whole day waiting with no one even taking your name - and then coming back the next day, and the next, until they finally get around to you.

Janice Bradshaw

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.

Eugene V. Debs

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. Then they told me deprived was a bad image, I was underprivileged. Then they told me underprivileged was overused, I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime. But I sure have a great vocabulary.

Jules Feiffer

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

E. M. Forster

People who are much too sensitive to demand of cripples that they run races ask of the poor that they get up and act just like everyone else in the society.

Michael Harrington

It is not poverty so much as pretense that harasses a ruined man - the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse - the keeping up of a hollow show that must soon come to an end.

Washington Irving

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

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

When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn't know it had a name.

Lyndon B. Johnson

Seldom do people discern Eloquence under a threadbare cloak.

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

The forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

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