poverty Quotes

There are men who dig for gold; he dug for compassion. Poverty was his goldmine; and the universality of suffering a reason for the universality of charity.

“The impoverished always try to keep moving, as if relocating might help. They ignore the reality that a new version of the same old problem will be waiting at the end of the trip . . . ”

“And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials.”

“Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were both poor and content to be so, until, in good season, we could improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You are changed. When it was made, you were another man.”

“This is the even-handed dealing of the world!” he said. “There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”

So the little girl went on with her little naked feet, which were quite red and blue with the cold. In an old apron she carried a number of matches, and had a bundle of them in her hands. No one had bought anything of her the whole day, nor had anyone given her even a penny. Shivering with cold and hunger, she crept along; poor little child, she looked the picture of misery. The snowflakes fell on her long, fair hair, which hung in curls on her shoulders, but she regarded them not.

[I]t was almost as cold at home as here, for they had only the roof to cover them, through which the wind howled, although the largest holes had been stopped up with straw and rags.

Where people are really attached, poverty itself is wealth.

“I want people to know what it feels like to nearly give up on yourself and why you might do it. I want people to understand what happens in the life of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children. I want people to understand the American Dream as my family encountered it. I want people to understand how upward mobility really feels. And I want people to understand something I learned only recently: that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.”

“Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Chaos begets chaos. Instability begets instability. Welcome to family life for the American hillbilly.”

“We don’t need to live like the elites of California, New York, or Washington, D.C. We don’t need to work a hundred hours a week at law firms and investment banks. We don’t need to socialize at cocktail parties. We do need to create a space for the J.D.s and Brians of the world to have a chance. I don’t know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

“Land is the basis of an aristocracy, which clings to the soil that supports it; for it is not by privileges alone, nor by birth, but by landed property handed down from generation to generation, that an aristocracy is constituted. A nation may present immense fortunes and extreme wretchedness, but unless those fortunes are territorial there is no aristocracy, but simply the class of the rich and that of the poor.”

“Our eating and exercise habits seem designed to send us to an early grave, and it’s working: In certain parts of Kentucky, local life expectancy is sixty-seven, a full decade and a half below what it is in nearby Virginia. A recent study found that unique among all ethnic groups in the United States, the life expectancy of working-class white folks is going down.”

“Pajamas? Poor people don’t wear pajamas. We fall asleep in our underwear or blue jeans. To this day, I find the very notion of pajamas an unnecessary elite indulgence, like caviar or electric ice cube makers.”

For to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.

“There’s no nobility in poverty. I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and I choose rich every time. At least as a rich man, when I have to face my problems, I can show up in the back of a stretch limousine, wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit and a twenty-thousand-dollar gold watch! And, believe me, arriving in style makes your problems a helluva lot easier to deal with.”

″‘All these people,’ the mouth organ man said, ‘are just like you, they’re tired, hungry, and a little bit nervous about tomorrow. This here is the right place for ya’ll to be ‘cause we’re all in the same boat. And you boys are nearer to home than you’ll ever get.‘”

“When she was walking me to the door, the librarian stopped at her desk and said, ‘Now I know that knowledge is a food, but I couldn’t help noticing you never went to eat. You must be very hungry.’ She handed me a paper bag and gave me another smile. ”

“The common people had to move, then, and they moved complaining and cursing because a rich man could do as he would and they packed their tattered possessions and went away swelling with anger and muttering that one day they would come back even as the poor do come back when the rich are too rich.”

“The woman said…‘I know you don’t understand what it means, but there’s a depression going on all over this country. People can’t find jobs and these are very, very difficult times for everybody. We’ve been lucky enough to find two wonderful families who’ve opened their doors for you.‘”

“The boys and I would wear threadbare clothing washed to dishwater color; but always, the taxes and the mortgage would be paid up.”

“In the first place no one cares enough to come down here, and in the second place if anyone should come, maybe he could see all the things we need—current books for all of our subjects, not just somebody’s old throwaways, desks, paper, blackboards, erasers, maps, chalk…”

“Mama had to buy our clothes in shifts, which meant that we each had to wait our turn for new clothes.”

“The research subjects didn’t ask questions. They were poor and uneducated, and the researchers offered incentives: free physical exams, hot meals, and rides into town on clinic days, plus fifty-dollar burial stipends for their families when the men died”

“It was a warm and beautiful day for hitchhiking. To get out of the impossible complexities of Chicago traffic I took a bus to Joliet, Illinois, went by the Joliet pen, stationed myself just outside town after a walk through its leafy rickety streets behind, and pointed my way. All the way from New York to Joliet by bus, and I had spent more than half my money.”

“During the depression,” said the cowboy to me, “I used to hop freights at least once a month. In those days you’d see hundreds of men riding a flatcar or in a boxcar, and they weren’t just bums, they were all kinds of men out of work and going from one place to another and some of them just wandering.”

″‘Well, then, I’ll put it off.’ I had no money. I sent my aunt an airmail letter asking her for fifty dollars and said it would be the last money I’d ask; after that she would be getting money back from me, as soon as I got that ship.”

″‘I can’t make you like me. I can’t stand the thought of you hungry or cold or scared. I can’t make you a Six.‘”

“Son — I come from five generations of people who was slaves and sharecroppers – but ain’t nobody in my family never let nobody pay ‘em no money that was a way of telling us we wasn’t fit to walk the earth. We ain’t never been that poor. We ain’t never been that — dead inside.”

“He came from a large family—thirteen, fourteen, fifteen: I don’t know how many—and he had to fight for every crumb of food he got.”

“I don’t have all the books I need. In some classes I have two children studying out of one book. And even with that, some of the pages in the book are missing. I need more paper to write on, I need more chalk for the blackboards, I need more pencils, I even need a better heater.”

“I went down afterwards into Yorkshire; but my Father was dead, and my Mother, and all the Family extinct, except that I found two Sisters, and two of the Children of one of my Brothers; and as I had been long ago given over for dead, there had been no Provision made for me;”

“Ok, so maybe my white teammates had problems, serious problems, but none of their problems was life threatening . . . But I looked over at the Wellpinit Redskins, at Rowdy . . . I knew that two or three of those Indians might not have eaten breakfast that morning.”

“He told me, I might judge of the Happiness of this State, by the one thing, viz. That this was the State of Life which all other People envied, that Kings have frequently lamented the miserable Consequence of being born to great things, and wish’d they had been placed in the Middle of the two Extremes, between the Mean and the Great; that the wise Man gave his Testimony to this as the just Standard of true Felicity, when he prayed to have neither Poverty or Riches.”

″‘Haven’t you ever wondered,’ he attempted, ‘what good it is for them to be healed, those people that Jesus cures? They’re happy at first. But what happens to them after that? What does the blind man think, when he has wanted for years to see, and then looks at his wife in rags and his children covered in sores?”

“But I can’t blame my parents for our poverty because my mother and father are the twin suns around which I orbit and my world would EXPLODE without them.”

“Seriously, I know my mother and father had their dreams when they were kids. They dreamed about being something other than poor, but they never got the chance to be anything because nobody paid attention to their dreams.”

“Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.”

“Television is the command center of the new epistemology. There is no audience so young that it is barred from television. There is no poverty so abject that it must forgo television. There is no education so exalted that it is not modified by television.”

“In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.“

″When you use money to fight poverty, it can be of great value, but too often, you’re working at the margins. When you’re putting people on the moon, you’re inspiring all of us to achieve the maximum of human potential, which is how our greatest problems will eventually be solved.″

“Somehow, out of the watch shop that never made money, he fed and dressed eleven more children after his own four were grown.”

“The water from the holes in the lakebed could be collected only in tiny amounts. If her mother tried to boil such a small amount, the pot would be dry long before they could count to two hundred.”

“But . . . you born with two strikes on you before you come to the plate. You got to guard it closely . . . always looking for the curve-ball on the inside corner. You can’t afford to let none get past you. You can’t afford a call strike. If you going down . . . you going down swinging.”

“Both poverty and riches are the offspring of thought.”

“To the pond and back—to the pond and back—nearly a full day of walking altogether. This was Nya’s daily routine seven months of the year.”

“Pedigree, ancestral skeletons, monumental record, the D’Urberville lineaments, did not help Tess in her life’s battle as yet, even to the extent of attracting to her a dancing-partner over the heads of the commonest peasantry.”

“Thank God I am not married: what would she have done in the poverty now coming upon me!”

“The sheep were not insured. –All the savings of a frugal life had been dispersed at a blow: his hopes of being an independent farmer were laid low—possibly for ever.”

“He waited for some moments, listening, before he too took up the air with them. He was listening with pain of spirit to the overtone of weariness behind their frail fresh innocent voices. Even before they set out on life’s journey they seemed weary already of the way.”

“Thinking all Silvers are evil is just as wrong as thinking all Reds are inferior…. What my people are doing to you and yours is wrong to the deepest levels of humanity. Oppressing you, trapping you in an endless cycle of poverty and death, just because we think you are different from us? That is not right. And as any student of history can tell you, it will end poorly.”

“Some people said that medicine addresses only the symptoms of poverty.”

“In his mind, he was fighting all poverty all the time, an endeavor full of difficulties and inevitable failures.”

“Paul has created technical solutions to help the rest of us get to decency, a road map to decency that we can all follow without trying to imitate him.”

“It appears that a college education has been given an artificially high price tag in order to leave students with little money left over for the basic requirements of living. Burdened by poverty, students are induced to drink cheap beer and eat past--in short, they are forced to act like Pirates and Pastafarians--and we can only conclude that this is some part of His greater plan to spread FSMism.”

“But my intention is very far from being confined to provide only for the children of professed beggars; it is of a much greater extent, and shall take in the whole number of infants at a certain age who are born of parents in effect as little able to support them as those who demand our charity in the streets.”

“Crazy to live without a wall to protect you. Even in Robledo, most of the street poor—squatters, winos, junkies, homeless people in general—are dangerous. They’re desperate or crazy or both. That’s enough to make anyone dangerous.”

“Material poverty, spiritual richness.”

“These mothers, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time in strolling to beg for sustenance for their helpless infants, who, as they grow up, either turn thieves for want of work, or leave their dear native country to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell themselves to the Barbados.”

“Some persons of a desponding spirit are in great concern about that vast number of poor people who are aged, diseased, or maimed, and I have been desired to employ my thoughts what course may be taken to ease the nation of so grievous an encumbrance.”

“I like Curtis Talcott a lot. Maybe I love him. Sometimes I think I do. He says he loves me. But if all I had to look forward to was marriage to him and babies and poverty that just keeps getting worse, I think I’d kill myself.”

“I stood on the sidewalks of New York with a black skin, practically no money, and I was not absorbed with the burning questions of the left-wing literary movement in the United States, but with the problem of how to get a bath.”

“The day I begged bread from the city officials was the day that showed me I was not alone in my loneliness, society had cast millions of others with me.”

“She stares awkwardly down at the kitchen counter. Then, quietly, she tells me about four other children I never knew existed.”

“Cesar is not a philosophical man. His life has been one long flight from reflection. At least he is clever enough not to expose the poverty of his general ideas; he never permits the conversation to move toward philosophical principles. ”

“In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him. On the same day another English child was born to a rich family of the name of Tudor, who did want him.”

“Aycliffe stared at me for a long while as if in search of something. All he said, however, was ‘With your mother gone you’re required to deliver your ox to the manor house tomorrow. It will serve as the death tax.’ ‘But… sir,’ I said—for my speech was slow and ill formed—‘if I do… I… I won’t be able to work the fields.’ ‘Then starve,’ he said and rode away without a backward glance.”

“In a moment all the heavy sorrow and misery which sleep had banished were upon him again, and he realized that he was no longer a petted prince in a palace, with the adoring eyes of a nation upon him, but a pauper, an outcast, clothed in rags, prisoner in a den fit only for beasts, and consorting with beggars and thieves.”

“He’s let things beat him, Roy Luther has. The land, Kiser Pease, the poverty. Now he’s old and sick and ready to die and when he does, this is what we’ll inherit - his defeat and all that goes with it.”

“No one ever said that you could work hard – harder even than you ever thought possible – and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.”

“Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don’t need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high.”

“What about the economic disparities? What about the fact that proportionally speaking, there are more people of color living in poverty than white people? Have you even thought about that?”

“The Government justifies keeping everyone else in poverty because people seem to work the hardest when they’re right on the edge of survival.”

“The man tells Dad, I can see you’re a man that did his bit. Dad says, Och, I did my bit, and the man says, I did me bit, too, and what did it get me but one eye less and a pension that wouldn’t feed a canary. But Ireland is free, says Dad, and that’s a grand thing.”

“Dad stands for a minute, swaying, and puts the penny back in his pocket. He turns toward Mam and she says, You’re not sleeping in this bed tonight. He makes his way downstairs with the candle, sleeps on a chair, misses work in the morning, loses the job at the cement factory, and we’re back on the dole again.”

“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”

“I can remember my mother refusing to go out into the street because she couldn’t stand the sight of all the children begging for bread when she had nothing to give them. Her first worry was for me and my brother, and every slice of bread she gave another child meant one less for us.”

“There’s an obvious difference between the children who live in homes where the money can run out and the ones who don’t. How old you are when you realize that also makes a difference.”

“Sometimes I touched a sewing needle with my finger and reflected how such a small object, so nearly weightless, could keep our little family from the poorhouse and provide us with enough food to sustain life- although there were times when we were barely sustained.”

“Frightened by the pains yet to come, by the black misery which was about to fall upon him, by the prospect of all the physical privation and of all the moral tortures which he was to suffer, he went to get the new necklace, putting down upon the merchant’s counter thirty-six thousand francs.”

“The poets brace themselves for imminent, overeducated poverty.”

‘Badger on the Barge’ – this story had depth and originality. Helen was a practical child whose narrative voice interestingly explored grief in a close-knit family.

‘The Egg-Man’ – a harrowing, heart-wrenching story. Everything about ‘The Egg-Man’ was spot-on.

“Father washed his hands and asked, ‘What’s for lunch today?’ Mother sighed. ‘Nothing!’ she replied. ‘We spent the lunch money at the amusement park.‘”

It’s a small collection of short stories, and they all center on children struggling amid the widespread social problems of our time, including poverty or absence of parents or other issues.

“It was all rather complicated because Mummy had said that we had to go live in the country because Daddy had lost his money in pepper; and an awful thought came to me that perhaps we wouldn’t be able to afford a license for Shadow or his dinners.”

“Set in the 1900s it tells the story of one family life when they are thrust into poverty when the man of the house ups and leaves for a year.. ”

“When I signed on with Guardian I took a vow of poverty. If my clients can survive on two bucks a day for food, the least I can do is cut every corner.”

“I came west in search of a better life, but my American dream was turned into a nightmare by poverty and hardship and greed.”

“God knows we done all we could, as poor as we are—we wouldn’t see him want anything while he was in it.”

“Yes, but what sort of men? Broken down tramps and good for nothings, fellows who have spent all their money drinking, and want to get more for it. Do you want me to believe that with these arms and he would clench his fists and hold them up in the air, so that you might see the rolling muscles that with these arms people will ever let me starve?”

“How was a poor man to know?”

There is never enough to go around in an asylum, so things are always skimpy—at least in a poor asylum like ours.

An unmarried man could save, if he did not drink, and if he was absolutely selfish—that is, if he paid no heed to the demands of his old parents, or of his little brothers and sisters, or of any other relatives he might have, as well as of the members of his union, and his chums, and the people who might be starving to death next door.

Sallie offered to dress her hair, and Annie to tie her sash, and Belle, the engaged sister, praised her white arms. But in their kindness Meg saw only pity for her poverty, and her heart felt very heavy as she stood by herself, while the others laughed, chattered, and flew about like gauzy butterflies.

Meg learned to love her husband better for his poverty, because it seemed to have made a man of him, given him the strength and courage to fight his own way, and taught him a tender patience with which to bear and comfort the natural longings and failures of those he loved.

I may be mercenary, but I hate poverty, and don’t mean to bear it a minute longer than I can help. One of us must marry well. Meg didn’t, Jo won’t, Beth can’t yet, so I shall, and make everything okay all round.

“Poor and proud, as usual, but she’ll do.”

“Mercédès has no fortune; I have none to settle on her. So, you see, our papers were quickly written out, and certainly do not come very expensive.”

“I’ve just been in jail,” Jurgis cried—he was ready to get down upon his knees to the woman—“and I had no money before, and my family has almost starved.”

“They are all poor,” he answered. “They gave me this. I have done everything I can—”

“It is easy to perceive I am not a rich man; but in this world a man does not thrive the better for being honest.”

“Please, sir,” said Jurgis, “can I have something to eat? I can pay.” To which the farmer responded promptly, “We don’t feed tramps here. Get out!”

“Yes,” said Jurgis, “that’s what they all think; and so they crowd into the cities, and when they have to beg or steal to live, then people ask ‘em why they don’t go into the country, where help is scarce.”

“No money! Ho, ho—less be chums, ole boy—jess like me! No money, either—almost busted! Why don’t you go home, then, same’s me? “I haven’t any home,” said Jurgis.”

“Master, of a million mouths, is not one unfed?”

“I am a poor student, sick and shattered by poverty.”

“It was base of me to say that.... My mother herself is almost a beggar... and I told a lie to keep my lodging... and be fed,”