Quotations about Poverty

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin. ~Charles Darwin


My poverty is not complete: it lacks me. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


Society comprises two classes: those who have more food than appetite, and those who have more appetite than food. ~Sébastien-Roch Nicholas de Chamfort, Maximes


Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that. ~Norman Vincent Peale


Poverty sits by the cradle of all our great men and rocks all of them to manhood. ~Heinrich Heine


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


You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money. ~P.J. O'Rourke, A Parliament of Whores


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


Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn't commit. ~Eli Khamarov, Lives of the Cognoscenti


The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers. ~William James


Seldom do people discern
Eloquence under a threadbare cloak.
~Juvenal


It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them. ~Bill Vaughan


Every man has a right to be poor. ~Richard Jefferies


Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving. ~O. Henry, Heart of the West, 1907


You can't quit poverty. ~Two and a Half Men, "I Can't Afford Hyenas," written by Eddie Gorodetsky and Jeff Abugov, original airdate 2 February 2004, spoken by the character Alan Harper


We didn't starve, but we didn't eat chicken unless we were sick, or the chicken was. ~Bernard Malamud


A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money. ~W.C. Fields


Affluence creates poverty. ~Marshall McLuhan


The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time. ~Willem de Kooning


Poverty is the mother of crime. ~Marcus Aurelius


The poor are poor because the rich are rich. ~Author Unknown


Hunger makes a thief of any man. ~Pearl S. Buck


To a man with an empty stomach food is God. ~Gandhi


Almsgiving tends to perpetuate poverty; aid does away with it once and for all. ~Eva Perón


Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient. ~Sydney Smith, His Wit and Wisdom, 1900


There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread. ~Mahatma Gandhi


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


However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. ~Henry David Thoreau


One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. ~Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 1929


Poor and content is rich, and rich enough. ~William Shakespeare