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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.

Random quote on Poverty

Most quoted on poverty:

In the advanced economies, I would say: To avoid mass unemployment, poverty and widening inequality.

Robert Solow

Bitter poverty has no harder pang than that it makes men ridiculous.

Juvenal

It is not easy for men to rise whose qualities are thwarted by poverty.

Juvenal

If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution.

Aneurin Bevan In Place of Fear (1952)

It is not poverty, Nestor, to have nothing at all.

Martial Epigrams (104)

All intense interest in luxury is a mark of inner poverty. The less grace there is in the soul, the more ornament must be on the body.

Fulton J. Sheen Peace of Soul (1949)

There is a thought that poverty is a public policy failure; poverty is man-made by action and non-action: poverty can be eliminated.

Benjamin Mkapa

Choose honest poverty, not dishonest wealth;
The one earns pity, the other but reproof.

Antiphanes

Poverty wants much; but avarice, everything.

Publilius Syrus

False shame keeps company with him that's poor;
Shame that or harries man or profits him.
Shame poverty pursues, and rashness wealth.

Hesiod Works and Days (-700)

Human survival, in a situation of resources degradation, hunger, poverty and uncontrolled climate migration, will make conflict an inevitable result.

Nisreen Elsaim

From the heart of Aleppo, I declare to the world that our war with tyrants has ended, and our battle against poverty has already begun.

Ahmed al-Sharaa Presidency (2025)

A rich man cannot enjoy a sound mind nor a sound body, without exercise and abstinence; and yet these are truly the worst ingredients of poverty.

Henry Home, Lord Kames Treasury of Thought (1881)

“A writer is part of society; a writer notices what is going on around him, sees the poverty every day.”

Dambudzo Marechera

We all live in a state of ambitious poverty.

Juvenal

In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.

John Steinbeck The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)

While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not.

Howard Zinn A People's History of the United States (1980)

These are not just numbers. They represent real people, mothers, children, and communities trapped in poverty and disease.

Gertrude Kazarwa

One in five American children live in poverty, even as pundits tout employment highs.

Rajan Menon Trump’s War on the Poor Includes Our Children (2020)

Abolish plutocracy if you would abolish poverty. As millionaires increase, pauperism grows. The more millionaires, the more paupers.

Rutherford B. Hayes Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922)

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