Poverty Quotes

Many a rich man’s bed is bigger than many a poor woman’s bedroom; his bedroom, her house.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The cigar has been smoked out, and we are the ashes.

~ Anthony Trollope

the ignobility of thought and action that desperation born of indigence produces.

~ Iain M. Banks

We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know that we will win. But I've come to believe we're integrating into a burning house.I'm afraid that America may be losing what moral vision she may have had …. And I'm afraid that even as we integrate, we are walking into a place that does not understand that this nation needs to be deeply concerned with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. Until we commit ourselves to ensuring that the underclass is given justice and opportunity, we will continue to perpetuate the anger and violence that tears at the soul of this nation.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

If you refuse to deal with time today, time will deal with you tomorrow.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Stressful conditions from outside school are much more likely to intrude into the classroom in high poverty schools. Every one of ten stressors is two to three times more common in high poverty schools-- Student hunger, unstable housing, lack of medical and dental care, caring for family members, immigration issues, community violence and safety issues.

~ Robert D. Putnam

The impoverished always try to keep moving, as if relocating might help.

~ Markus Zusak

She fell on the bread and cheese as if she were a lioness. Did lions eat cheese? He didn’t know. He knew Mrs Prater’s kitten ate cheese. He ate anything. Poor bloody animal. Still, he was a slum cat, no reason why his life should be better than a humans' sad ruddy existence.

~ Luggs

But apparently you don't need dot-com wealth to ruin an area for its low-income residents. The Pioneer Press quotes Secretary of HUD Andrew Cuomo ruing the cruel irony that prosperity is shrinking the stock of affordable housing nationwide: The stronger the economy, the stronger the upward pressure on rents.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

You did not die when you were drawing public assistance money, but you certainly did not remain alive.

~ Nevil Shute

Not every poor or unemployed person who has one wears a political party’s t-shirt to reveal their political affiliation, some use it merely to conceal their nipples.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Leftovers are less tasty if they were left over by someone else, unless you are poor.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Every condition exists,” Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, “simply because someone profits by its existence. This economic exploitation is crystallized in the slum.” Exploitation. Now, there’s a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.

~ Matthew Desmond

Mostly they all were products of single parents, and in the most tragic category - black boys, with no particular criminal inclinations but whose very lack of direction put them in the crosshairs of the world.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

There seems little correlation between poverty and honesty. One would rather expect the opposite, dishonesty may not always pay but surely it sometimes does

~ Milton Friedman

A majority of people in these surveys also said that America gives too much aid--but when they were asked how much America should give, the median answers ranged from 5 percent to 10 percent of government spending. In other words, people wanted foreign aid 'cut' to an amount five to ten times greater than the United States actually gives!

~ Peter Singer

Greeting cards routinely tell us that everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all of the time.

~ Zadie Smith

Nothing was simple, certainly not simplification.

~ Colum Mccann

A sure way a country can develop is through a true development of the masses. Yes! A sure way to ensure a true freedom of the people is for the people take up their own destiny into their hands and bond their strengths to positively dare with a clear vision and fortitude like the eagle for a great change in wisdom and in peace, devoid of rebellious motive, massacre and nepotism, and with tenacity, direct the thought, policy and inspiration of the few people who rule the masses for the best change ever! Until this is done, the masses shall always cry out of ignorance, not knowing the real power within them and beg at the feet of the few people for how they should live their lives!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Some people envied Ronan’s money. Adam envied his time. To be as rich as Ronan was to be able to go to school and do nothing else, to have luxurious swathes of time in which to study and write papers and sleep. Adam wouldn’t admit it to anyone, least of all Gansey, but he was tired. He was tired of squeezing homework in between his part-time jobs, of squeezing in sleep, squeezing in the hunt for Glendower. The jobs felt like so much wasted time: In five years, no one would care if he’d worked at a trailer factory. They’d only care if he’d graduated from Aglionby with perfect grades, or if he’d found Glendower, or if he was still alive. And Ronan didn’t have to worry about any of that.

~ Maggie Stiefvater

A poor man is a living dead one.

~ Anzia Yezierska

...we so resented that asshole up there talking talking talking taking up the entire assembly expecting us to believe there isn't a special creation of God, or of man, to which we didn't belong, here in the shabby south end of Hammond in the worst damn public school in the district, we didn't belong and never would. And what the hell? ---Such truths, FOXFIRE made softer.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

It's an insidious twist of thought that leads one to demand women to give up their reproductive rights to force unwanted pregnancies but then, once birthed from the womb, to deny them access to basic necessities required for even a mediocre life like education, clean air, healthcare, and a fair wage. And these people have the audacity to call their position pro-life.These same people who bemoan the welfare state, yet refuse to require business to honor a fair wage, appear to want to create the very circumstances that they ceaselessly complain about. I dare say that by perpetuating this condition, by feeding the apparatus of poverty, they are satiating their narcissism.With poverty securely entrenched, these lucky few can sit back and smile with smug superiority. Because of course, they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, they worked harder, and they have earned what they have. It's a meritocracy, they say, if only by merit of their parent's color of flesh or social standing.So yes, let's churn out more children who will be unable to claw their way out of poverty, and if they just happen to defy the odds, let's brainwash them into believing this tripe called the American Dream so they will assist us as we throw their less fortunate fortunate siblings into the hungry machine of conservatism. Because we are really only interested in conserving the status quo.

~ Michael Brewer

I see seven people in one room and one pregnant and people fucking anyway because people so poor that they can’t even afford shame and I wait

~ Marlon James

The Gospel shows people their wounds and bestows on them love. It shows them their bondage and supplies the hammerto knock away their chains. It shows them their nakedness and provides them the garments of purity. It shows them their poverty and pours into their lives the wealth of heaven. It shows them their sins and points them to the Savior.

~ Billy Graham

I always worried because whenever a drought struck, an accursed storm of blood always followed.

~ Bo-Young Kim

When they passed a maintenance site in the road bed, Einstein stopped next to a worker who was smashing stones and silently observed this boy with torn clothes and dirty face and hands. He asked your father how much the boy earned each day. After asking the boy, he told Einstein: five cents.

~ Liu Cixin

It is bad enough when rich Christians show little concern for the poor, but when they moan about their lot, they show contempt not only for the poor but also for the generosity of God.

~ Tim Chester

Doing without will wear on you until temptation is stronger than character, sometimes.

~ Dan Groat

The provisions for the poor which structure both land ownership and the sacred calendar in ancient Israel, the rights of gleaners and of those widows, orphans, and strangers who pass through the fields, and the cycles of freedom from debt and restoration of alienated persons and property, all work against the emergence of the poor as a class, as people marked by deprivation and hopelessness.

~ Marilynne Robinson

Every morning, when people are getting up in the tent, the babies are crying, people are pushing each other at the taps outside and some children are already pulling the crusts of porridge off the pots we ate from last night, my first-born brother and I clean our shoes. Our grandmother makes us sit on our mats with our legs straight out so she can look carefully at our shoes to make sure we have done it properly. No other children in the tent have real school shoes. When we three look at them it’s as if we are in a real house again, with no war, no away.

~ Nadine Gordimer

Treatments worked well enough for us to get by. Most people lived into old age, but the medication, like everything else, has never been free. Life was a privilege, not a right, apparently. Something you had to struggle for when you were unlucky enough to be born at the intersection of poverty and bad genes.

~ Jacqueline Koyanagi

A man may live to be as old as Methuselah,’ said Mr. Filer, ‘and may labour all his life for the benefit of such people as those; and may heap up facts on figures, facts on figures, facts on figures, mountains high and dry; and he can no more hope to persuade ’em that they have no right or business to be married, than he can hope to persuade ’em that they have no earthly right or business to be born. And that we know they haven’t. We reduced it to a mathematical certainty long ago!

~ Charles Dickens

Narcissism is as profitable to a model as scruffiness is to a homeless person.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Poverty in a big city is more humiliating and deadening to all the joys of life than it can possibly be elsewhere.

~ Albert Bigelow Paine

Poverty and desperation are the parents of ambition. (character Norm Woodruff)

~ Phil Valentine

I am not wise enough to say how much of all this squalor and wretchedness and hunger is the fault of the people themselves, how much of it belongs to circumstances and environment, how much is the result of past errors of government, how much is race, how much is religion. I only know that children should never be hungry, that there are ignorant human creatures to be taught how to live; and if it is a hard task, the sooner it is begun the better, both for teachers and pupils. It is comparatively easy to form opinions and devise remedies, when one knows the absolute truth of things; but it is so difficult to find the truth here, or at least there are so many and such different truths to weigh in the balance....

~ Kate Douglas Wiggin

Rabbi Hiyya advised his wife, “When a poor man comes to the door, be quick to give him food so that the same may be done to your children.” She exclaimed, “You are cursing our children [with the suggestion that they may become beggars].” But Rabbi Hiyya replied, “There is a wheel which revolves in this world.” —Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 151b

~ Joseph Telushkin

And then I sez—‘How is anybody a-goin’ to live pattern lives, when they are a-starvin' to death? And how is anybody a-goin’ to enjoy religion when they are a-chokin’?

~ Marietta Holley

Because of poverty and ignorance, not everyman living on earth lives in the same epoch!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan