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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:

The safest wealth is the poverty of needs.

Franz Werfel

I see an America where poverty is defeated by opportunity, not enabled by a government check.

Mitt Romney

Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.

Wallace Stevens Opus Posthumous (1957)

To be a star is to own the world and all the people in it. After a taste of stardom, everything else is poverty.

Hedy Lamarr Popcorn in Paradise (1980)

Life is hard by the yard, son. But you don't have to do it by the yard. By the inch it's a cinch. And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty.

Nelson Algren A Walk on the Wild Side (1956)

There has been a way of seeing Africa in terms of poverty and conflict which has become a kind of shorthand for the continent that still persists today.

Zeinab Badawi

The economy needs you to transform it so that we can reduce the levels of poverty that most Rwandans live in .

Daphrose Gahakwa

Education shall be given the highest priority because it is the greatest weapon against poverty.

Bola Tinubu

The hopes of the Republic cannot forever tolerate either undeserved poverty or self-serving wealth.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Those who have a spark of self-respect left, prefer open defiance, prefer crime to the emaciated, degraded position of poverty.

Emma Goldman Anarchism and Other Essays (1910)

The petty bias of personal taste can no longer hide either excrescence or spiritual poverty in the name of style.

Frank Lloyd Wright A Testament (1957)

There is no greater wealth than wisdom, no greater poverty than ignorance; no greater heritage than culture and no greater support than consultation.

Ali

He who practices moderation and frugality will never be threatened with poverty.

Ali

Quick riches are more dangerous than poverty.

Napoleon Hill Think and Grow Rich (1938)

There is no greater poverty than oblivion to self and others.

Vanna Bonta State of the Art (2000)

The vicious circle linking poverty, police, courts and prison is an integral element of ghetto existence.

Angela Davis If They Come in The Morning (1971)

Poverty and Genius were coupled by the wisdom of Providence for wise and good ends, no doubt

Ignatius Sancho

The great doctors all got their education off dirt pavements and poverty — not marble floors and foundations.

Martin H. Fischer Fischerisms (1944)

Relentlessly feeding on poverty and economic dislocation, a New World Order was taking shape.

Michel Chossudovsky The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order - Second Edition (2003)

One of the motivations was killing black babies, because they didn't want to deal with the problems of illiteracy and poverty.

Herman Cain

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