Quotes About Poverty

Poverty is not the root cause of crime.

It's easy to rob a greedy man, because he deserves to be robbed; it's easy to rob a rich man, because he can afford to be robbed; but it's difficult to rob a poor man, even one who really doesn't care if he's robbed

Poverty and lack of knowledge must be challenged.

The rich would have to eat money if the poor did not provide food.

Interestingly, some of the worst anti-Irish discrimination came from the Scotch-Irish, who wanted to make clear that they were a different group from the impoverished newcomers.

The west and southwest of Ireland bore the brunt of the famine. Those areas, including Mayo, Sligo, Roscommon, Galway, Clare, and Cork, were the poorest regions of the island, and the most dependent on subsistence farming. Not coincidentally, these were also the areas that Catholic Irish had been sent to during the Protestant plantation.

Scurvy became a problem. This disease comes from a deficiency of vitamin C, and it causes the victim's connective tissue to break down. The Irish called scurvy black leg, because it made the blood vessels under the skin burst, giving a victim's limbs a black appearance. The cure for scurvy is fresh food — meat, vegetables, or fruit — none of which was available to the poor in Ireland. There

Cholera was always a problem in unsanitary, crowded conditions; it broke out in workhouses throughout the famine years.

The field that cannot feed even its tiller Burn down every stalk that stands on it.

The best loved by God are those that are rich, yet have the humility of the poor, and those that are poor and have the magnanimity of the rich.

Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday's and today's school dropouts are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did.

Now then, you have the masses of black people in this country who are the offshoot of the field Negro, during slavery. They are the masses. They are the ones who are jobless. They are the last hired and the first fired.

Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday's and today's school drop-outs are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did. And they inevitably move into more and more, worse and worse, illegality and immorality.

My family was so poor we were close to eating the holes inside of doughnuts.

La pobreza no curte el alma ni la favorece. La esclaviza.

But death and life, success and failure, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, all these happen to good and bad alike, and they are neither noble or shameful—and hence neither good nor bad.

But death and life, success and failure, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, all these happen to good and bad alike, and they are neither noble nor shameful—and hence neither good nor bad.

As for life therefore, and death, honour and dishonour, labour and pleasure, riches and poverty, all these things happen unto men indeed, both good and bad, equally; but as things which of themselves are neither good nor bad; because of themselves, neither shameful nor praiseworthy.

Poverty is the mother of crime.

La muerte y la vida, la buena fama y la mala, el sufrimiento y el placer, la riqueza y la pobreza, todas esas cosas ocurren indistintamente a los hombres tanto a los buenos como a los malos porque no son ni hermosas ni vergonzosas. No son ni buenas ni malas[192]

The book of Proverbs makes the same point: Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker, but those who are kind to the needy honor him. (14.31)

So the issue is not character flaws among the elites. The issue, rather, is a system in which some people sleep on beds made of ivory while others end up being sold for the price of a pair of sandals.

The slave ships are ghost ships still sailing around the edges of our modern consciousness. Their legacy in the present is discrimination, deep poverty, structural inequality, and premature death.

If people think that friendship springs from weakness and from a purpose to secure someone through whom we may obtain that which we lack, they assign her, if I may so express it, a lowly pedigree indeed, and an origin far from noble, and they would make her the daughter of poverty and want.