Poverty Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

If it is true that one is poor on account of all the things one wants, the ambitious and the avaricious languish in extreme poverty.

Jean de La Bruyère

In general, Russia suffers from a frightening poverty in the sphere of facts and a frightening wealth of all types of arguments.

Our own security is enhanced when peace breaks out between warring parties in other continents.
But war or peace; the destruction or the protection of nature; the violation or promotion of human rights and democratic freedoms; poverty or material well-being; the lack of moral and spiritual values or their existence and development; and the breakdown or development of human understanding, are not isolated phenomena that can be analysed and tackled independently of one another. In fact, they are very much interrelated at all levels and need to be approached with that understanding.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Prodigality of Time produces Poverty of Mind as well as of Estate.

Benjamin Franklin

You can take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the big house and the nice suits, but I hope you don't. Not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate, although I believe you do have that obligation. Not because you have a debt to all those who helped you get here, although I do believe you have that debt. It's because you have an obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. Because thinking only about yourself, fulfilling your immediate wants and needs, betrays a poverty of ambition.

The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth. Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy, and where the poor rule, that is a democracy.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, of sickness, or captivity, would, without this comfort, be insupportable; nor does it appear that the happiest lot of terrestrial existence can set us above the want of this general blessing; or that life, when the gifts of nature and of fortune are accumulated upon it, would not still be wretched, were it not elevated and delighted by the expectation of some new possession, of some enjoyment yet behind, by which the wish shall at last be satisfied, and the heart filled up to its utmost extent.

In England an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.

Poverty is a lot like childbirth—you know it is going to hurt before it happens, but you'll never know how much until you experience it.

So holy and so perfect is my love, And I in such a poverty of grace, That I shall think it a most plenteous crop To glean the broken ears after the man That the main harvest reaps.

William Shakespeare

The true friend of the people should see that they be not too poor, for extreme poverty lowers the character of the democracy.

The bright old day now dawns again; the cry runs through the the land,
In England there shall be dear bread—in Ireland, sword and brand;
And poverty, and ignorance, shall swell the rich and grand,
So, rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand,
Of the fine old English Tory days;
Hail to the coming time!

Charles Dickens

During the entire last century many of the best minds were engaged in the study of social and economic questions. At the beginning of this new century we are still asking "riddles about the starving." After many years of most elaborate investigations printed in thousands of volumes issued by federal and state governments we are almost as far from any definite knowledge concerning the extent of poverty as we have ever been.

Robert Hunter (author)

A recent United Nations High-Level Panel identified five categories of threats that we face:
1. Poverty, Infectious Disease, and Environmental Degradation;
2. Armed Conflict — both within and among states;
3. Organized Crime;
4. Terrorism; and
5. Weapons of Mass Destruction.
These are all 'threats without borders' — where traditional notions of national security have become obsolete. We cannot respond to these threats by building more walls, developing bigger weapons, or dispatching more troops. Quite to the contrary. By their very nature, these security threats require primarily multinational cooperation.

Mohamed ElBaradei

The only thing poverty does is grind down your nerve endings to a point that you can work harder and stoop lower than most people are willing to. It chips away a person's dreams to the point that the hopelessness shows through, and the dreamer accepts that hard work and borrowed houses are all this life will ever be.

A propensity to hope and joy is real riches: One to fear and sorrow, real poverty.

Given the proper suggestion, the Subconscious Mind will manifest success from failure, health from disease, prosperity from poverty, friendship and love from loneliness and isolation. For nothing is impossible to the Subconscious Mind and it operates entirely by suggestion.

Uell Stanley Andersen

There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.

Sherwood Anderson

No nation as rich as ours should have so many people isolated on islands of poverty in such a sea of material wealth.

When you introduce markets in food, then you introduce two very simple rules. The first rule is this: if you have money you can get the food from wherever around the world. The other rule markets impose is this: if you do not have money, you will starve. This is an important point … The reason why people starve is because of poverty … not because of a shortage of food … but because the only way to access the food is through the market.

I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor...I truly believe that when the rich meet the poor, riches will have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end.

Shane Claiborne

Until women are brought out of poverty, humanity can't move forward.

Billie Jean King

Foreign aid is patently not necessary to emerge from poverty. Many poor countries and regions have progressed rapidly before foreign aid was ever heard of.

Peter Thomas Bauer

One of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants to be rich. That's the American ideal. Poor people don't like talking about poverty because even though they might live in the projects surrounded by other poor people and have, like, ten dollars in the bank, they don't like to think of themselves as poor.