Poverty Quotes

Poverty - it is life near the bone, where it is sweetest

Henry David Thoreau

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.... It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.

Kurt Vonnegut

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

Pride breakfasted with plenty, dined with poverty, and supped with infamy.

Benjamin Franklin

Where people are really attached, poverty itself is wealth.

Jane Austen

Poverty is the worst kind of violence.

Mahatma Gandhi

Bums are the well-to-do of this day. They didn't have as far to fall.

Jackson Pollock

If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.

Jean Cocteau

The principle of asceticism never was, nor ever can be, consistently pursued by any living creature. Let but one tenth part of the inhabitants of the earth pursue it consistently, and in a day's time they will have turned it into a Hell.

Jeremy Bentham

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.

G. W. F. Hegel

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

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

Poverty consist in feeling poor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest man in history was the poorest.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The poor would never be able to live at all if it were not for the poor.

George Moore

The ascetic makes a necessity of virtue.

Friedrich Nietzsche

In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he needs to diabolize the other part.

Friedrich Nietzsche

When the rich wage war it is the poor who die.

JeanPaul Sartre

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.

Saint Francis of Assisi

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

Anatole France