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:
Society as a whole would return... to the actual poverty of an agricultural and handicraft age.
The things which philosophy attempts to teach by reasoning, poverty forces us to practice.
Sadly, the combination of poverty and ignorance is toxic and deadly.
"A nation's poverty is directly related to the quality of its leadership."
Poverty and Christian heroism are here and trials are the riches of priests in this land.
The worst kind of shame is being ashamed of frugality or poverty.
Clothes make the poor invisible.... America has the best-dressed poverty the world has ever known.
O Poverty! thou source of human art,
Thou great inspirer of the poet’s song!
If all you boast of your great art be true;
Sure, willing poverty lives most in you.
And rustic life and poverty
Grow beautiful beneath his touch.