Quotes About Poverty

The poor man is not he who is without a cent, but he who is without a dream.

I realized that poverty was a kind of captivity.

Americans lack any deeper appreciation of class. Beyond white anger and ignorance is a far more complicated history of class identity that dates back to America's colonial period and British notions of poverty.

British colonists promoted a dual agenda: one involved reducing poverty back in England, and the other called for transporting the idle and unproductive to the New World. After

The theatrical performance of politicians who profess to speak for an "American People" do nothing to highlight the history of poverty.

Many people----women especially----remain trapped in the poverty into which they were born. The successful person from this background is the exception. The American dream is a double-edged sword in that those who are able to carve out their own destiny are also hard-pressed not to condemn those who get struck between the cracks.

Poor whites are still taught to hate—but not to hate those who are keeping them in line. Lyndon Johnson knew this when he quipped, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

In this sense, what Hakluyt foresaw in a colonized America was one giant workhouse. This cannot be emphasized enough. As the "waste firm of America" was settled, it would become a place where the surplus poor, the waste people of England, could be converted into economic assets.

The "layouts," men who refused to volunteer or to appear for service once drafted, were rounded up by guards who were crudely called "dog catchers." Substitutes came from the poorest class of men, and were generally despised by other soldiers.

what would happen, he posed, if one hundred thousand poor children and one hundred thousand rich children were all given the same food, clothing, education, care, and protection? Class lines would likely disappear.

oral folk culture suggests that poor men openly joked about it. Desertion to them was part of the daily resistance to upper-class rule.

Antiabortion activists, like eugenicists, think that the state has the right to intervene in the breeding habits of poor single women.

Both crackers and squatters—two terms that became shorthand for landless migrants—supposedly stayed just one step ahead of the "real" farmers, Jefferson's idealized, commercially oriented cultivators. They lived off the grid, rarely attended a school or joined a church, and remained a potent symbol of poverty.

As the "waste firm of America" was settled, it would become a place where the surplus poor, the waste people of England, could be converted into economic assets.

The Louisiana Territory, as he envisioned it, would encourage agriculture and forestall the growth of manufacturing and urban poverty

early as 1775, landless tenants in Loudoun County, Virginia, voiced a complaint that was common across the sprawling colony: there was "no inducement for the poor man to Fight, for he had nothing to defend.

Can a nation call itself free if it finds itself periodically on the verge of bankruptcy and starvation in the face of the fact that it possesses all the materials of the good life?

large numbers of early American colonists spent their entire lives in such dingy, nasty conditions.

meaningful, too, that the recently established Freedmen's Bureau paired impoverished whites and freed people not as cutthroat adversaries, but as the worthy poor. From its inception in 1865, shortly before Lincoln's assassination, the bureau was specifically empowered to extend relief to "all refugees, and all freedmen," black and white.

from fathers cohabiting with daughters, to husbands selling wives, to mothers conniving illicit liaisons for daughters. The danger came from a growing population that had stopped disappearing into the wilderness. Reid was appalled by the filthy refugees living in railroad cars, an uncomfortable foreshadowing of twentieth-century trailer trash.

At all times, white trash remind us of one of the American nation's uncomfortable truths: the poor are always with us. A preoccupation with penalizing poor whites reveals an uneasy tension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises—the dream of upward mobility—and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unobtainable.

waste people," and later "white trash," marginalized Americans were stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children

The land and the poor could be harvested together, to add to—rather than continue to subtract from—the nation's wealth.

Distant American colonies were presented as a cure. The poor could be purged. In 1622, the famous poet and clergyman John Donne wrote of Virginia in this fashion, describing the new colony as the nation's spleen and liver, draining the "ill humours of the body . . . to breed good bloud.