Quotes About Poverty

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

I tell you, say the rich, the poor are naught but dirty wind welling in air-shafts over the cinders and droppings of the past, their voices thick with grease and ordure, sewer-greed to corrode the ear with the horrors of the past and the voids of new stupidity. One could drown waiting for the poor to make one fine distinction. Yes, destroy us say the rich and you lose the roots of God.

Will you buy my hair?

One dollar and eighty-seven cents.

Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far.

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

Poverty may be a privilege and even a way of life for the monk in the desert,for he has only himself to sustain and none but his god to please, but I consider poverty to be the mark of lack of ability or lack of ambition.I am not deficient in either of these qualities!

Poverty may be a privilege and even a way of life for the monk in the desert, for he has only himself to sustain and none but his god to please, but I consider poverty to be the mark of a lack of ability or a lack of ambition. I am not deficient in either of these qualities!

law grinds the poor, rich men rule the law

There are countless poor and uneducated people around the world. The vast majority of them, if they think of America at all, don't want to kill us; they simply want to be here. Many, as we know from both legal and illegal immigration, want to come to the United States to partake in the opportunity that is every American's birthright. They have no interest in flying airplanes into buildings or putting on an exploding vest.

We're not stupid! We're just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinction

I think a lot about the poems I wasn't able to write...I masturbrated...Solitude is essentially a matter of pride; you bury yourself in your own scent. The issue is the same for all real poets. If you've been happy for too long, you become banal. By the same token, if you've been unhappy for a long time, you lose your poetic power...Happiness and poverty can only coexist for the briefest time. Afterword either happiness coarsens the poet or the poem is so true it destroys his happiness.

These were innocent people, so innocent that they thought poverty a crime that wealth would allow them to forget. --- from the notebooks of Celal Salik

Now everyone is prouder and poorer

Contrary to what the West seems to think, it is not poverty that brings people like us so close to God. It's the fact that no one is more curious than we are to learn why we are here on earth and what will happen to us in the next world.

When a Westerner meets someone from a poor country, he feels deep contempt. He assumes that the poor man's head must be full of all the nonsense that plunged his country into poverty and despair.

To see the city in black and white is to see it through the tarnish of history: the patina of what is old and faded and no longer matters to the rest of the world. Even the greatest Ottoman architecture has a humble simplicity that suggests an end-of-empire gloom, a pained submission to the diminishing European gaze and to an ancient poverty that must be endured like an incurable disease. It is resignation that nourishes Istanbul's inward-looking soul.

Is this the secret of Istanbul—that beneath its grand history, its living poverty, its outward-looking monuments, and its sublime landscapes, its poor hide the city's soul inside a fragile web?

Throughout history, religious leaders and other honorable men of conscience have always warned against this shaming confusion. They remind us that the poor have hearts, minds, humanity, and wisdom just like everyone else. When Hans Hansen sees a poor man he feels sorry for him. He would not necessarily assume that the man's a fool who's blown his chances or a drunk who's lost his will.

If you ever happen to become a clothier-cum-messenger like Esther, you'll soon learn that only wealth, might and legendary romances stir people's curiosity. Everything else is but worry, separation, jealousy, loneliness, enmity, tears, gossip and never-ending poverty.

poverty is the open-mouthed hell which yawns beneath civilization, we

America. The enemy. The rival. The land of jeans and rock and roll, of crime and capitalism, of poverty and oppression. Of home and freedom.

It's like communes—people with nothing are always willing to share.

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.