Quotes About Poverty

A thief, though rich, will continue to steal, but an honest man, though poor, will ever seek to pay his debts.

My father was a poor man, very poor in a British colonial possession where class and race were very important.

It is not poverty so much as pretense that harasses a ruined man - the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse - the keeping up of a hollow show that must soon come to an end.

So holy and so perfect is my love, And I in such a poverty of grace, That I shall think it a most plenteous crop To glean the broken ears after the man That the main harvest reaps.

How like a railway tunnel is the poor man's life, with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity!

A few men own from ten thousand to two hundred thousand acres each. The poor Laborer can find no resting place, save on the barren mountain, or in the trackless desert.

There is one class of men, whom it especially behoves to be tenacious of the right of free discussion. I mean the poor.

When a man is starving in the streets he is not thinking of bread and water, but of caviar and champagne!

Cruel irony, the poor man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case.

Men praise poverty, as the African worships Mumbo Jumbo--from terror of the malign power, and a desire to propitiate at.

The poor man must walk to get meat for his stomach, the rich man to get a stomach to his meat.

At the working man's house, hunger looks in but dares not enter.

Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor, at least no one worth speaking of.

The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man.

To drive men from independence to live on alms, is itself great cruelty.

Charity feeds the poor, so does pride; charity builds an hospital, so does pride. In this they differ: charity gives her glory to God; pride takes her glory from man.

How unfair the fate which ordains that those who have the least should be always adding to the treasury of the wealthy.

The devil makes you think you are poor and makes even others who practice prayer think this of themselves. And he is somewhat right because you have promised poverty -- orally, that is. I say orally, for it is impossible that, if with the heart we understand what we promise and then promise it, the devil could draw us for twenty years and even our whole lives into this temptation; 'impossible,' because we would see that we are deceiving the world and our own selves.

It is a most certain truth that the richer we see ourselves to be, confessing at the same time our poverty, the greater will be our progress, and the more real our humility.

A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.

The poor prey on one another because their lives offer no hope and communicate the tragic message to these human beings that they have no possibility to attain a decent standard of living.

Empty is the house of a childless man; as empty is the mind of a bachelor; empty are all quarters of the world to an ignorant man; but poverty is total emptiness.

He alone is poor who does not possess knowledge.

War. Rape. Murder. Poverty. Equal rights for gays. Guess which one the Southern Baptist Convention is protesting?