Poverty Quotes

I am my brother's keeper, and he's sleeping pretty rough these days.

Archbishop Derek Worlock

Many people have their reputations as reporters and analysts because they are on television, batting around conventional wisdom. A lot of these people have never reported a story.

Bob Woodward

Many people have their reputations as reporters and analysts because they are on television, batting around conventional wisdom. A lot of these people have never reported a story.

Bob Woodward

Many people have their reputations as reporters and analysts because they are on television, batting around conventional wisdom. A lot of these people have never reported a story.

Bob Woodward

Many people have their reputations as reporters and analysts because they are on television, batting around conventional wisdom. A lot of these people have never reported a story.

Bob Woodward

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

Thomas Gray

I have an old hat which is not worth three francs, I have a coat which lacks buttons in front, my shirt is all ragged, my elbows are torn, my boots let in the water; for the last six weeks I have not thought about it, and I have not told you about it. You only see me at night, and you give me your love; if you were to see me in the daytime, you would give me a sou!

Victor Hugo

He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.

Victor Hugo

Poverty is not a shame, but the being ashamed of it is.

English Proverb

Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

George Orwell

People have often said to me, 'Surely when you are with the tramps they don't really accept you as one of themselves? Surely they notice that you are different--notice the difference of accent?' etc., etc. As a matter of fact, a fair proportion of tramps, well over a quarter I should say, notice nothing of the kind. To begin with, many people have no ear for accent and judge you entirely by your clothes. I was often struck by this fact when I was begging at back doors. Some people were obviously surprised by my 'educated' accent, others completely failed to notice it; I was dirty and ragged and that was all they saw. Again, tramps come from all parts of the British Isles and the variation in English accents is enormous. A tramp is used to hearing all kinds of accents among his mates, some of them so strange to him that he can hardly understand them, and a man from, say, Cardiff or Durham or Dublin does not necessarily know which of the south English accents is an 'educated' one. In any case men with 'educated' accents, though rare among tramps, are not unknown. But even when tramps are aware that you are of different origin from themselves, it does not necessarily alter their attitude. From their point of view all that matters is that you, like themselves, are 'on the bum'. And in that world it is not done to ask too many questions. You can tell people the history of your life if you choose, and most tramps do so on the smallest provocation, but you are under no compulsion to tell it and whatever story you tell will be accepted without question. Even a bishop could be at home among tramps if he wore the right clothes; and even if they knew he was a bishop it might not make any difference, provided that they also knew or believed that he was genuinely destitute. Once you are in that world and seemingly of it, it hardly matters what you have been in the past. It is a sort of world-within-a-world where everyone is equal, a small squalid democracy...

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan

Hard as it may appear in individual cases, dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful.

Thomas Robert Malthus

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

Samuel Johnson

If you are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life, your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

George Bernard Shaw

In a change of masters the poor change nothing except their master's name.

Phaedrus

All this is simply to say that all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty or thirty years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.

Martin Luther King Jr.

There is no Them. There are only facets of Us.

John Green

As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.

Raoul Vaneigem

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

The best way to help poor people is to not be one of them.

Bob Harrington