Quotes About Poverty

In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.

Neither great poverty nor great riches will hear reason.

As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish special privilege we are going to see poverty and special privilege grow.

Where people work longest and with least leisure, they buy the fewest goods. No towns were so poor as those of England where the people, from children up, worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day. They were poor because these overworked people soon wore out -- they became less and less valuable as workers. Therefore, they earned less and less and could buy less and less.

As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish special privilege we are going to see poverty spread and special privilege grow.

As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish special privilege we are going to see poverty spread and special privilege grow. We

Material progress does not merely fail to relieve poverty, it actually produces it. This association of progress with poverty is the great enigma of our times. It is the riddle that the sphinx of fate puts to our civilization. And which NOT to answer is to be destroyed.

It is but natural for those who can trace their own better circumstances to the superior industry and frugality that gave them a start, and the superior intelligence that enabled them to take advantage of every opportunity,? to imagine that those who remain poor do so simply from lack of these qualities.

wealth so abundant that there would be no cause for that harassing fear that sometimes paralyses even those who are not considered the poor, the fear that every man of us has probably felt, that if sickness should smite him, or if he should be taken away, those whom he loves better than his life would become charges upon charity.

We talk about over-production. How can there be such a thing as over-production while people want? All these things that are said to be over-produced are desired by many people. Why do they not get them? They do not get them because they have not the means to buy them; not that they do not want them. Why have not they the means to buy them? They earn too little. When the great masses of men have to work for an average of $1.40 a day, it is no wonder that great quantities of goods cannot be sold

There is no difficulty in discovering what makes those people poor. They have no right to anything that nature gives them. All they can make above a living they must pay to the landlord. They not only have to pay for the land that they use, but they have to pay for the seaweed that comes ashore and for the turf they dig from the bogs. They dare not improve, for any improvements they make are made an excuse for putting up the rent.

Why, in spite of increase in productive power, do wages tend to a minimum which will give but a bare living?

But whether the amount of capital ever does limit the productiveness of industry, and thus fix a maximum which wages cannot exceed, it is evident that it is not from any scarcity of capital that the poverty of the masses in civilized countries proceeds. For not only do wages nowhere reach the limit fixed by the productiveness of industry, but wages are relatively the lowest where capital is most abundant.

You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn, while you deprive the community even of the moderate services that he is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage you substitute unemployment. You do harm all around, with no comparable compensation.

China does not want revolution; it does not want war or revenge; it simply wants the Chinese people to "bid farewell to poverty and enjoy a better life" and for China to become—in contrast to the taunting rejectionism of Mao—"the most responsible, the most civilized, and the most law abiding and orderly member of the international community."32

Let's face it - think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth?

The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

As to my heart, since I have worn an eighty franc corset I do not hear it, and I am very much afraid that I have left it in one of Marcel's drawers.

Florida Highway, 1986. Lonely slum. I passed through on low wheels. It was hot outside. Shacks, gas stations that didn't work, dead corn in fields, children on the road, retarded and dulled by the heat. Two girls waved as I passed.

I am poor, and I am glad that i am, for i find that wealth makes more people mean than it duz generous.

Rand herself composed a sentence that could have come from the pen of a Southern planter: "The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains.

That which constitutes the cause of the economic poverty of our age is what the English call over-production (which means that a mass of things are made which are of no use to anybody, and with which nothing can be done).

All the wounds of society, the wounds of poverty, of vice, of ignorance—all will be laid bare. Is there not something re-assuring in this?