2,719 Quotes About Poverty

A man in poverty suffers intermittently but a man in debt suffers constantly.

A dinner sponsored by a debt spoils the next day.

Libraries were a solace in the Depression. They were warm and dry and useful and free; they provided a place for people to be together in a desolate time. You could feel prosperous at the library. There was so much there, such an abundance, when everything else felt scant and ravaged, and you could take any of it home for free. Or you could just sit at a reading table and take it all in.

Poverty often puts some people below the law.

Nowadays, our leaders prefer to search for the causes of crime and poverty in the actions or inaction of those at the very bottom of society. The obscene transfers of wealth over the past forty years from that bottom to a privileged few at the top--and from much of the Third World to financial elites in the West--are all excused as the natural evolution of the Market, when, in fact, they are products of unparalleled greed by those who shape and direct that Market.

You could live your whole life in one of those cities and never know how ugly it was somewhere else.

Personally, I would be ashamed to be rich and have precious and expensive goods only to show to the other people that I have more worth than them when in some parts of the world there are people who suffer. No one has more worth than anyone. Everyone can be worthy if he has conditions in his life that enable him to reclaim his values. Worth lies in culture, not in appearance and possession. Besides, every person has his own mission in this world and everyone is valuable.

Pitying a living man for being poor is like envying a dead man for being rich.

Sigh: who was it who said that to get into heaven, you needed a letter of recommendation from the poor?