Poverty Quotes
Juvenal has the most entries, with Solomon, Shakespeare, Ali and the Nigerian politician Peter Obi after him. The older sourced material is blunt. Shaw’s Major Barbara (1905) calls poverty the greatest of evils and the worst of crimes, and Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770) has a line addressed to poetry: “that found’st me poor at first, and keep’st me so.” Mark Twain gets in a joke in 1869, saying that a man is fast rising from affluence to poverty.
Three entries are flagged. “Poverty is the worst kind of violence” is credited to Gandhi as disputed. A passage on love having hands to help others is credited to Augustine, also disputed. “Widespread poverty and concentrated wealth cannot long endure side by side in a democracy” is credited to Thomas Jefferson and flagged misattributed.
Most quoted on poverty:
It is better to be poor and walk in integrity than to be stupid and speak lies.
If a poor person envies a rich person, he is no better than the rich person.
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
In the affairs of this world, poverty alone is without envy.
The nakedness of the indigent world may be clothed from the trimmings of the vain.
Rattle his bones over the stones!
He's only a pauper, whom nobody owns!