Poverty Quotes

The tricky thing about the hood is that you’re always working, working, working, and you feel like something’s happening, but really nothing’s happening at all.

~ Trevor Noah

The world has been taught to be scared of him, but the reality is that he is scared of the world because he has none of the tools necessary to cope with it.

~ Trevor Noah

...[A] lot of them, without even understanding the cause, just give up. They take what they can-mostly in pleasure,and they make the grand gesture, the wild gesture, because what have they got to lose if they do die in a car wreck or a knife fight or something else equally stupid.

~ John Howard Griffin

The master doesn’t need to chain his slaves; their needs will chain them to him. You can end slavery by the stroke of a pen, but the pressing call of necessity will reestablish it.

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Slaves in the past were captured by force, today’s slaves surrender themselves. The masters are the same old folk (who are now more civilized) who would not lift a hand against a fellow human being! They have established economic systems that perpetuate their superiority so the poor are blamed either for their laziness or their fate.

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Free yourself from mental slavery. Break those invisible chains your masters put on your spiritual neck to control you

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

She had developed a number of habits in her younger years, none of which carried with them a bright future, and the things she would offer to do for a couple of dollars would make the Devil blush.

~ Rachel Autumn Deering

I never doubted I would have a roof over my head, a school to go to, enough to to eat, books (and newspapers) to read, a safe neighborhood to play in and a doctor to see if I got sick.My parents and grandparents made sure I knew I was lucky.

~ Chelsea Clinton

The truth is, Japan is headed for crisis. We are in the hands of greedy businessmen and weak politicians. Such people will see to it poverty grows every day.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Poverty cannot be defeated unless you first defeat it in the mind.

~ Nicky Verd

God's friendship is with people who know their poverty.

~ Oswald Chambers

As to having a preference, that was new too. You take what you're given and you're grateful for it. Once that message is well and truly ingrained in you, it feels like vainglory to imagine one's own likes and dislikes could matter to other people.

~ Laini Taylor

If you can see through my eyes, you may see the real beauty I see in poor people, in old age homes, unprivileged children, abandoned houses, empty streets, broken dreams unfulfilled expectations. You can see the new life struggling beneath our comfortable lives.

~ Ratish Edwards

Papa used to say that wealth is a sin and poverty is a punishment but that God apparently wants there to be no connection between the sin and the punishment. One man sins and another is punished. That's how the world is made.

~ Amos Oz

Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times.

~ Graham Greene

Looking at these people now from behind the counter, made her feel like that little girl again, the deprived child that used to press her nose on the glass, peering at things she could never have.

~ Effrosyni Moschoudi

Instead he was grabbing at whatever was available in this system that no longer held the old predictable relationship between effort and result as true

~ Panashe Chigumadzi

Silently, she wondered whether this was the same desperation, the same impotence that grips many men by their shirts, their T-shirts, their work vests, gripping them equally hard, shaking them and leading them to drink,to beating or the noose. Was this it?

~ Panashe Chigumadzi

Granted, many of them replied, that socialism may not result in riches for all but rather in a smaller production of wealth; nevertheless the masses will be happier under socialism, because they will share their worries with all their fellow citizens, and there will not be wealthier classes to be envied by poorer ones. The starving and ragged workers of Soviet Russia, they tell us, are a thousand times more joyful than the workers of the West who live under conditions which are luxurious compared to Russian standards; equality in poverty is a more satisfactory state than well-being where there are people who can flaunt more luxuries than the average man.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

Maybe the greatest anger and frustration come not from unemployment or poverty or the lack of a future but from the feeling that you have no culture, because you've been torn between cultures, between incompatible symbols. How can you exist if you don't know where you are? So you burn cars, ecause when you have no culture, you're no longer a civilised animal, you're a wild beast. And a wild beast burns and kills and pillages.

~ Muriel Barbery

They don't know what poor is. They don't know that poverty is a sharp knife carving away at you. They don't know what it does to the body. To a mind.

~ Nicola Yoon

Poverty was a dog whose teeth sank deep.

~ Oscar Handlin

How was a boy who'd tasted poverty ever expected to choose the poorer road?

~ Kate Morton

Can the law get blood out of a stone? I haven't any money.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

The poor who commit murder, rape and robbery are not only not starving, they have far more material things than the word ‘poverty’ suggests.

~ Dennis Prager

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not neccessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.

~ Henry David Thoreau

How agonized we are by how people die. How unconcerned we are by how they live.

~ P. Sainath

If I had a single wish, I would wish sixty seconds of total depravity upon myself. For one of the greatest gifts of all is to have ‘nothing’ so that I can finally learn how to appreciate ‘everything’.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Natural disasters happen from time to time but poverty happens all the time and therefore poverty is the greatest tragedy, it is the greatest disaster of mankind!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences - deep, corrosive, obstinate differences - radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

~ Lyndon B. Johnson

All forms of dire poverty and brutality were things to forbid as insults to the fair body of mankind, every injustice a false note to avoid in the harmony of the spheres.

~ Marguerite Yourcenar

The essence of economic inequality is borne out in a simple fact: there are 400 billionaires in the United States and 45 million people living in poverty. These are not parallel facts, they are intersecting facts. There are 400 American billionaires

~ Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood. I have nothing but contempt for the people who despise money. They are hypocrites or fools. Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off. The only thing to be careful about is that you do not pay more than a shilling for the shilling you earn. You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent. I pity with all my heart the artist, whether he writes or paints, who is entirely dependent for subsistence upon his art.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.

~ John Stuart Mill

Poverty would always exist when we allow injustices to speak.

~ Henry Johnson Jr

Leaders should never alienate themselves from the poor, if their main aim is to alleviate poverty.

~ Gift Gugu Mona

You know what you learn when you study the legal system? Poor people pass down damage the way rich people pass down an inheritance.

~ Dan Chaon

When you have no choice, you have no discontent either.

~ Vivek Shanbhag

Anyone called upon to view misery will view criminality differently. All state officials should be required to spend a month serving in a homeless shelter to learn love.

~ Joseph Roth

Greed is the fast-track to poverty.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough