Quotes About Poverty

The poor man finds happiness in economy; the rich man, misery.

The choice of life is not between fame and fortune, nor wealth and poverty, but between good and evil.

Raisa Mora's street was packed with seen-better-days row houses. Maya found the right address and headed up steps of cracked concrete. She pressed the buzzer, listened for footsteps, heard nothing. Smashed bottles lined the walk. Two doors down a man in an open flannel shirt over a wifebeater tee gave her a toothless smile. They

but when a man spends his relief checks on green whiskey his children have a way of crying from hunger pains. I don't know of any landowner around here who begrudges those children any game their father can hit.

It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn't hurt you.

He was bleeding slowly to death in the midst of abundance, for his life's blood was poverty.

Thereafter, he [Bob Ewell] resumed his regular weekly appearances at the welfare office for his cheque, and received it with no grace amid obscure mutterings that the bastards who thought they ran this town wouldn't permit an honest man to make a living.

Atticus said professional people were poor because the farmers were poor. As Maycomb County was farm country, nickels and dimes were hard to come by for doctors and dentists and lawyers.

Dr. Buford's profession was medicine and his obsession was anything that grew in the ground, so he stayed poor.

Lei era la figlia del dottor Frank Buford, un proprietario della zona, per il quale la medicina costituiva soltanto una professione, mentre la vera passione restava la terra, cosicché era rimasto povero. Invece la passione di zio Jack per le colture si era limitata alle cassette di fori che aveva sulla finestra a Nashville, e così era potuto diventare ricco.

Mais ce pays met en application l'idée que tous les hommes naissent égaux dans une institution humaine qui fait du pauvre l'égal d'un Rockefeller, du crétin l'égal d'un Einstein, et de l'ignorant l'égal de n'importe quel directeur de lycée. Cette institution, messieurs les jurés, c'est le tribunal.

He didn't forget his lunch, he didn't have any. He had none today nor would he have any tomorrow or the next day. He had probably never seen three quarters together at the same time in his life.

Atticus said one time the reason Aunty's so hipped on the family is because all we've got's background and not a dime to our names.

There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.

We were broke in a way that only kids can be broke. Our toes were black with dye from wearing boots that weren't waterproof. We had infected ear lobes and green rings around our fingers from cheap jewelry. No one ever even had a chocolate bar.

Men were taught to have so much pride, to go out into the world and make something of themselves. This Depression was deeply humiliating. Since women were taught that they were worthless, they took poverty and hardship less personally.

Poor people knew that all good times had to be paid for.

The poor know they are in need.

Today it is very fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately, it is not fashionable to talk with them.2

'Sunday Morning Coming Down' is probably the most directly autobiographical thing I'd written. In those days, I was living in a slum tenement that was torn down afterwards, but it was $25 a month in a condemned building, and 'Sunday Morning Coming Down' was more or less looking around me and writing about what I was doing.

The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it. We do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off - we do not have to stand for this.

I like the back country, wildlife and all of that, but it's wrong to force poor people to live that way.

It's maddening in my travels to watch children dying simply because they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

For some reason, I wrote about the bed we slept in when I was a kid. It was a half-acre of misery, that bed, sagging in the middle, red hair sticking out of the mattress, the spring gone and the fleas leaping all over the place.