Poverty Quotes

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Poverty sits by the cradle of all our great men and rocks all of them to manhood. 

Heinrich Heine

Hunger makes a thief of any man.

Pearl S. Buck

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

Mahatma Gandhi

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

Charles Darwin

The rich men are answerable for the misery of the poor.
Yet they are not aware of their own power to control.
They look away like any man
And so it goes, the poor endure.

Daniel Seker

That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.

Michael Harrington

Poor men's reasons are not heard.

Thomas Fuller

It is life near the bone where it is sweetest.

Henry David Thoreau

We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life.  If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. 

William James

A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money. 

W. C. Fields

I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.

Anatole France

Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed of it, is.

Benjamin Franklin

The mother of revolution and crime is poverty.

Aristotle

Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of the mind is irreparable.

Michael de Montaigne

The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.

William de Kooning

Here we all live in a state of ambitious poverty.

Juvenal

Virtue often trips and falls over the sharp edge of poverty.

Eugene Sue

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving.

Oliver Henry

Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.

Abraham Lincoln

Bed is the poor man's opera.

Italian Proverb

If rich, it is easy enough to conceal our wealth; but, if poor, it is not quite so easy to conceal our poverty. We shall find that it is less difficult to hide a thousand guineas, than one hole in our coat.

Charles Caleb Colton

Poverty makes you sad as well as wise.

Bertolt Brecht



Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient. 

Sydney Smith

With poverty everything becomes frightful.

Nicholas Boileau

He is poor indeed that can promise nothing.

Thomas Fuller

An avowal of poverty is no disgrace to any man; to make no effort to escape it is indeed disgraceful. 

Thucydides

Poverty is the mother of crime.

Marcus Aurelius

Poverty is death in another form.

Latin Proverb

He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.

Victor Hugo

Poverty is often concealed in splendor, and often in extravagance. It is the task of many people to conceal their neediness from others. Consequently they support themselves by temporary means, and everyday is lost in contriving for tomorrow.

Samuel Johnson

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