Poverty Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

But poverty, though it does not prevent the generation, is extremely unfavourable to the rearing of children. The tender plant is produced, but in so cold a soil, and so severe a climate, soon withers and dies.

Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds.
Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The poverty of goods is easily cured; the poverty of the soul is irreparable.

Michel de Montaigne

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

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.

As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish special privilege we are going to see poverty spread and special privilege grow.

A great nation is a compassionate nation. Who are the least of these? The least of these are those who still find themselves smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in an affluent society. Who are the least of these? They are the thousands of individuals who see life as a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign. Who are the least of these? They are the little boys and little girls who grow up with clouds of inferiority floating in their little mental skies because they know that they are caught in conditions of economic depravation. Who are the least of these? They are the individuals who are caught in the fatigue of despair. And somehow if we are to be a great nation, we must be concerned about the least of these, our brothers.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Bravery is a mean state concerned with things that inspire confidence and with things fearful... and leading us to choose danger and to face it, either because to do so is noble, or because not to do so is base. But to court death as an escape from poverty, or from love, or from some grievous pain, is no proof of bravery, but rather of cowardice.

The spinning wheel and the spinning wheel alone will solve, if anything will solve, the problem of the deepening poverty of India.

'Abdullah ibn Mughaffal said, "A man said to the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, "Messenger of Allah, by Allah, I love you." He said, "Be careful of what you say." He said, "By Allah, I love you," three times. He said, "If you love me, then prepare yourself for poverty. Poverty comes swifter to the one who loves me than a flood to its destination."

None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

Henry David Thoreau

It is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork.

The problems we face now – poverty and violence at home, war and destruction abroad – will last only as long as we continue relying on the same politicians who created them. A change in leadership is required to change these outcomes.

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.

It is not necessarily poverty of spirit that makes a woman surround herself with life—it can be a superabundance of interest...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, andthe country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land,--travel a whole day together,--looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and poor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is most often unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.

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

Benjamin Franklin

The truth is that the want of common education with us is not from our poverty, but from the want of an orderly system. More money is now paid for the education of a part than would be paid for that of the whole if systematically arranged.

Thomas Jefferson

Work keeps us from three great evils, boredom, vice, and poverty.

You can never win a war against terror as long as there are conditions in the world that make people desperate — poverty, disease, ignorance, et cetera. I think people are beginning to realize that you can't have pockets of prosperity in one part of the world and huge deserts of poverty and deprivation and think that you can have a stable and secure world.

The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations of Europe. In the neighbourhood of Canton many hundred, it is commonly said, many thousand families have no habitation on the land, but live constantly in little fishing boats upon the rivers and the canals. The subsistence which they find there is so scanty that they are eager to fish up the nastiest garbage thrown overboard from any European ship. Any carrion, the carcase of a dead dog or cat, for example, though half putrid and stinking, is as welcome to them as the most wholesome food to the people of other countries.

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