Poverty Quotes

if admiration were not generally deemed the exclusive property of the rich, and contempt the constant lackey of poverty, the love of gain would cease to be an universal problem.

~ William Godwin

A child who was born with a silver spoon is likely to not appreciate all he is provided with.And it is likely that a child who grew up from the dust to look down on others once the floods gate of success opens up for him.It is NOT where you come FROM that matters,But where you are GOING.

~ Nomthandazo Tsembeni

A man is rich not only by what he has, but also, and above all, by what he doesn't.

~ Neel Burton

It is good to stay in a peaceful poverty than to stay in a painful wealth.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.

~ Mohsin Hamid

I know what it is to be in need and what it is to have more than enough. I have learnt this secret, so that anywhere, at any time, I am content, whether I am full or hungry, whether I have too much or too little. I have the strength to face all conditions by the power that Christ gives me.

~ Anonymous

Poor people do not go on holiday, they go home.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Poor is what people become, not what they are born to be.

~ Saji Ijiyemi

How often do the poor in the US get to stand in front of their nation's Marie Antoinette's and shove the stale, mass-produced cake of lower class reality back into their mouths?

~ M.b. Dallocchio

A poor man knows the true value of money and will not dare waste it, but a rich man is extravagant and always looking for an opportunity to empty his pockets.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

How blissful it is, for one who has nothing. Attainers-of-wisdom are people with nothing. See him suffering, one who has something, a person bound in mind with people.

~ Gautama Buddha

John Locke, called the Father of Liberalism, made the argument that the individual instead of the community was the foundation of society. He believed that government existed by the consent of the governed, not by divine right. But the reason government is necessary is to defend private property, to keep people from stealing from each other. This idea appealed to the wealthy for an obvious reason: they wanted to keep their wealth. From the perspective of the poor, things look decidedly different. The rich are able to accumulate wealth by taking the labor of the poor and by turning the commons into privately owned commodities; therefore, defending the accumulation of wealth in a system that has no other moral constraints is in effect defending theft, not protecting against it.

~ Lierre Keith

Don't ever feel sad about who you are. Don't wish to be a daughter or son to a wealthy home, just because you think you're poor. Look! Everybody's poor, i discovered it when i realized that its not everything that President Barrack Obama has.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Poverty will not take you to heaven, just repent of it and get rich, then you'll trek into heaven like a king.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

I hate my country. There are so many rich people who don't share their shit. They're like spoiled little ten-year-old bullies on the playground. They hog the monkey bars and the slide and the seesaw. And if you complain even a little bit, if you try to get just one spin on the merry-go-round, the bullies beat the shit out of you.

~ Sherman Alexie

Better poverty without a care than wealth with its many obligations.

~ Aesop

No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great majority are so by force of poverty; they are still chained to a place, to an occupation, and to conformity with the will of an employer, and debarred, by the accident of birth both from the enjoyments, and from the mental and moral advantages, which others inherit without exertion and independently of desert. That this is an evil equal to almost any of those against which mankind have hitherto struggled, the poor are not wrong in believing. Is it a necessary evil? They are told so by, those who do not feel it---by those who have gained the prizes in the lottery of life. But it was also said that slavery, that despotism, that all the privileges of oligarchy, were necessary.

~ John Stuart Mill

You see, it is my passionately held belief that the right to possess property is at best a contingent one. When disparities become too great, a superior right, that to life, outweighs the right to property. Ergo, the very poor have the right to steal from the very rich.

~ Mohsin Hamid

Lajwanti made the cardinal mistake of trying to cross the dividing line that separates the existence of the rich from that of the poor. She made the fatal error of dreaming beyond her means. The bigger the dream, the bigger the disappointment.

~ Vikas Swarup

How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics.

~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

We have created a manic world nauseous with the pursuit of material wealth. Many also bear their cross of imagined deprivation, while their fellow human beings remain paralyzed by real poverty. We drown in the thick sweetness of our sensual excess, and our shameless opulence, while our discontent souls suffocate in the arid wasteland of spiritual deprivation.

~ Anthon St. Maarten

Real poverty is when hunger pangs force from my mind all thoughts but those of food. Real poverty is when the children are not dressed warmly enough for winter. Real poverty is when the housing we can afford is not adequate to the needs of our families. On the other hand, real poverty is - equally - when I have eaten so much that I am uncomfortable, and again, my thoughts center on food. Or when I have so many clothes that I have to spend a lot of mental energy making choices among them or finding ways to store them. Or when, regardless of my living conditions, I am discontent and brooding about how to have more. Real poverty is when material things are uppermost and pressing - whether because we have too few or too many of them. It is poverty, because the human mind and spirit are made for higher things, worthier pursuits.

~ Maxine Hancock

Compared to the rest of the world, it's like we're living in Disneyland.

~ David Servant

Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

~ Alain De Botton

Abundance isn't God's provision for me to live in luxury. It's his provision for me to help others live. God entrusts me with his money not to build my kingdom on earth, but to build his kingdom in heaven.

~ Randy Alcorn

God's Word teaches a very hard, disturbing truth. Those who neglect the poor and the oppressed are really not God's people at all—no matter how frequently they practice their religious rituals nor how orthodox are their creeds and confessions.

~ Ronald J. Sider

What an ironic tragedy that an affluent, “Christian” minority in the world continues to hoard its wealth while hundreds of millions of people hover on the edge of starvation!

~ Ronald J. Sider

It is a sinful abomination for one part of the world's Christians to grow richer year by year while our brothers and sisters ache and suffer for lack of minimal health care, minimal education, and even—in some cases—enough food to escape starvation.

~ Ronald J. Sider

Do not really like rich people, as they make us poor people feel dopey and inadequate. Not that we are poor. I would say we are middle. We are very, very lucky. I know that. But still, it is not right that rich people make us middle people feel dopey and inadequate.

~ George Saunders

So why is a third of our world battling obesity and spending huge sums to burn off excess calories, while the other two-thirds yearn to get more of them?

~ Wess Stafford

I don't know. I got nothing. No house, no people, no place. Maybe that's troubles. Don't I say?

~ Alex La Guma

In the developed countries there is a poverty of intimacy, a poverty of spirit, of loneliness, of lack of love. There is no greater sickness in the world today than that one.

~ Mother Teresa

A poor man is not disposed to quick and high resentment when he is among the rich: he is apt to yield to others, for he knows others are above him: he is not stiff and self-willed; he is patient with hard fare; he expects no other than to be despised, and takes it patiently; he does not take it heinously that he overlooked and but little regarded; he is prepared to be in a lowly place; he readily honours his superiors; he takes reproofs quietly; he readily honours others as above him; he easily yields to be taught, and does not claim much to his understanding and judgment; he is not over nice or humoursome, and has his spirit subdued to hard things; he is not assuming, nor apt to take much upon him, but it is natural for him to be subject to others. Thus it is with the humble Christian.

~ Jonathan Edwards

People up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.

~ Langston Hughes

Do not avoid doing what you love because you fear that it will only result in poverty or lack. If you fear this, then this is exactly what will happen.

~ Stephen Richards

In all Thénardier's outpourings, the words and gestures, the fury blazing in his eyes, this explosion of an evil nature brazenly exposed, the mixture of bravado and abjectness, arrogance, pettiness, rage, absurdity; the hodgepodge of genuine distress, and lying sentiment, the shamelessness of a vicious man rejoicing in viciousness, the bare crudity of an ugly soul -- in this eruption of all suffering and hatred there was something which was hideous as evil itself and still as poignant as truth.

~ Victor Hugo

Theology alone doesn't convine anyone.Only those words which are pregnant with action, theology that is born of suffering, of struggles, of the poor--this theology is a testimony. This theology leads to conversion. (Leonardo Boff, p. 169)

~ Mev Puleo

To be poor is to suffer. It's the kind of suffering that freezes the heart stone cold.

~ A Que

Why they were loaded with bags of beans and peas and anything else they happened to pick up when they were still some distance away from the street where the first blind man and his wife lived, for that is where they are going, is a question that could only occur to someone who has never in his life suffered shortages.

~ José Saramago

A human being can only take so much when their basic rights as a citizen of the earth are being denied to them – or sold at a high cost.

~ Suzy Kassem