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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:

Christ was the new era's first Communist. He lifted his voice in support of the impoverished, sick, and hungry, as well as everyone else in distress, and he would have joined us if he had been alive.

Gennady Zyuganov

All fathers and mothers, in all societies, want their children to be educated, and live free from poverty and violence. No people on Earth yearn to be oppressed, or aspire to servitude, or eagerly await the midnight knock of the secret police.

George W. Bush State of the Union address (2002)

The way in which the vast mass of the poor are treated by modern society is truly scandalous. They are herded into great cities where they breathe a fouler air than in the countryside which they have left.

Friedrich Engels The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845)

...all the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

William Henry Harrison

There will always be poor people.

Rush Limbaugh

The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.

Norman Mailer Barbary Shore (1951)

When millions of people remain mired in poverty, no matter how hard they work, our whole economy suffers. Consigning millions of people to the economic margins has a serious adverse effect on the economy for all of us.

Robert Rubin

Socialism was the only means of freeing the world from war and poverty. Socialism stood as a third alternative to a barbaric Communism and capitalism in a state of decay. Communism was a falsification of the principles of Socialism.

Clement Attlee

The fearful divide Trump has exacerbated is not simply between his supporters and his detractors, the rich and the poor, or Democrats and Republicans, but between the best and the worst in each of us.

Tony Schwartz I wrote The Art of the Deal with Trump. He's still a scared child (2018)

The poor who give despite their poverty, who share what would be necessary to them like the widow of Zarephath, perform miracles, conquer Heaven. (p. 123)

Claude La Colombière

We have no business allowing importation of drugs that we can produce here because all we are doing is importing poverty. There has to be industry where the young pharmacists can fit into after graduation.

Stella Chinyelu Okoli

…Poverty and violence are not God made, they are man made. Poverty and peace cannot coexist.

Ela Bhatt

Poverty must not be used as an excuse to continue child labor and exploitation of children … It’s a triangular relationship between child labor, poverty and illiteracy, and I have been trying to fight all of these things together.

Kailash Satyarthi

None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

Henry David Thoreau Walden (1854)

Prostitution has little to do with morality, and everything to do with poverty.

Lisa Mason The Golden Nineties (1995)

There is more poverty in the human heart than misery in life.

Émile de Girardin A Thousand Flashes of French Wit, Wisdom, and Wickedness (1902)

The ethical ideas on which civilization rests have been wandering about the world, poverty-stricken and homeless.

Albert Schweitzer Kulturphilosophie (1923)

Poverty united to bad conduct utterly destroys and upturns the life of man.

Diphilus

A propensity to hope and joy is real riches: One to fear and sorrow, real poverty.

David Hume Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741)

Knowledge might not be power, but ignorance was definitely weakness, and so was poverty.

Lois McMaster Bujold Komarr (1998)

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