Poverty Quotes

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All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.

Be present to those who, living in the midst of a society burdened by poverty and corruption, are broken in spirit, tempted to give up, to leave school and to live on the streets.

There is a saying in Tibetan that at the door of the miserable rich man sleeps the contented beggar. The point of this saying is not that poverty is a virtue, but that happiness does not come with wealth, but from setting limits to one's desires, and living within those limits with satisfaction.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Poverty wants some things, Luxury many things, Avarice all things

Benjamin Franklin

Poverty is the fundamental cause of most of the physical, moral and economic ills of humanity.

The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

George Bernard Shaw

All that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

Through our sunless lanes creeps Poverty with her hungry eyes, and Sin with his sodden face follows close behind her. Misery wakes us in the morning and Shame sits with us at night.

It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar, that, whenever we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation—of loneliness, poverty, and misery, the end and extreme of things—the thought of God comes into one's mind.

Vincent van Gogh

We now undertake that we cannot rest while millions of our people suffer the pain and indignity of poverty in all its forms.

Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound, or smell of it

George Bernard Shaw

I believe that none of us are fully free when others in the human family remain shackled by poverty or disease or oppression.

The very right to be human is denied every day to hundreds of millions of people as a result of poverty, the unavailability of basic necessities such as food, jobs, water and shelter, education, health care and a healthy environment.

The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.

Ernest Hemingway

In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice.

The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The good citizen is the man who, whatever his wealth or his poverty, strives manfully to do his duty to himself, to his family, to his neighbor, to the States; who is incapable of the baseness which manifests itself either in arrogance or in envy, but who while demanding justice for himself is no less scrupulous to do justice to others.

Theodore Roosevelt

It does not depend upon us to avoid poverty, but it does depend upon us to make that poverty respected.

I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

Martin Luther King, Jr.