Quotes about Poverty

Wealthy women have rights in every country. And poor women don't.

Civilization, therefore, or that which is so-called, has operated two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched,than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.

Public money ought to be touched with the most scrupulous consciousness of honour. It is not the produce of riches only, but of the hard earnings of labour and poverty. It is drawn even from the bitterness of want and misery. Not a beggar passes, or perishes in the streets, whose mite is not in that mass.

Despotic government supports itself by abject civilization, in which debasement of the human mind, and wretchedness in the mass of the people, are the chief criterions. Such governments consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise of intellectual faculty is not his privilege; that he has nothing do with laws but to obey them, and they politically depend more upon breaking the spirit of the people by poverty, than they fear enraging it by desperation. -Agrarian Justice

Poverty may be a privilege and even a way of life for the monk in the desert, for he has only himself to sustain and none but his god to please, but I consider poverty to be the mark of a lack of ability or a lack of ambition. I am not deficient in either of these qualities!

Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little often share.

If either wealth or poverty are come by honesty, there is no shame.

Insecurity is worse than poverty.

Glanton could see crouched in a corner a Mexican or halfbreed boy maybe twelve years old. He was naked save for a pair of old calzones and makeshift sandals of uncured hide. He glared back at Glanton with a sort of terrified insolence.

The point is not: take all thou hast and give to the poor, but use all thou hast to encourage the industry and give work to the poor.

...without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor.

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism.