Skip to content

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:

Where are those troops of poor, that throng'd of yore
The good old landlord's hospitable door?

Alexander Pope

Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it to.

Matthew Desmond

Speak out on behalf of the voiceless, and for the rights of all who are vulnerable.
Speak out in order to judge with righteousness and to defend the needy and the poor.

Solomon

Give then to the poor; I beg, I advise, I charge, I command you.

Augustine of Hippo

It is still her use
To let the wretched man outlive his wealth,
To view with hollow eye and wrinkled brow
An age of poverty.

William Shakespeare

The greatest man in history was the poorest.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Aspirations pure and high —
Strength to do and to endure —
Heir of all the Ages, I —
Lo! I am no longer poor!

Julia Caroline Dorr

There is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings, or by the shortcomings of someone else. It is all wrong to be poor, anyhow.

Russell Conwell Acres of Diamonds (1915)

Thou source of all my bliss, and all my woe,
That found'st me poor at first, and keep'st me so.

Oliver Goldsmith The Deserted Village (1770)

Few save the poor feel for the poor,
The rich know not how hard
It is to be of needful food
And needful rest debarred.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Poor and content is rich and rich enough,
But riches fineless is as poor as winter
To him that ever fears he shall be poor.

William Shakespeare Othello (1603)

Stepp'd me in poverty to the very lips.

William Shakespeare Othello (1603)

Be not among winebibbers; among riotous eaters of flesh: For the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty: and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags.

Solomon

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Frederick Douglass

Even before Covid-19, we squandered a decade in the fight against poverty, with misplaced triumphalism blocking the very reforms that could have prevented the worst impacts of the pandemic.

Philip Alston

All Crimes are safe, but hated Poverty.
This, only this, the rigid Law persues.

Samuel Johnson London: A Poem (1738)

O God! that bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap!

Thomas Hood

To have nothing is not poverty.

Martial

This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort.

Lyndon B. Johnson

Give beer to those who are perishing, wine to those who are in anguish; let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more.

Solomon

Related topics