Poverty quotes
1.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside poverty — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"In an era of global abundance, our world has the resources to reduce dramatically the massive divides that persist between rich and poor, if only those resources can be unleashed in the service of all peoples."
"Don't listen to the malicious comments of those friends who, never taking any risks themselves, can only see other people's failures."
"I loathed poverty and I would have liked to put my hands on the party who said that poverty is an honorable estate. It is an indication of inefficiency and nothing more. There is nothing honorable or fine about it."
"Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed of it, is."
"The amount of poverty and suffering required for a Rockefeller to emerge, and the amount of depravity entailed in the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible for the popular forces to expose this clearly."
"A pacifism which can see the cruelties only of occasional military warfare and is blind to the continuous cruelties of our social system is worthless."
"The greatest step forward in human evolution was made when society began to help the weak and the poor, instead of oppressing and despising them."
"The burden of poverty isn't just that you don't always have the things you need, it's the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you'd do anything to lift that burden."
"Poverty is not created by poor people. It is produced by our failure to create institutions to support human capabilities."
"The richness of God’s Word ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart."
"Poverty is a bitter thing; but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral, and intellectual flabbiness, to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all vain pursuits-the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in itself."
"The more humanity owes the poor man, the more society denies him."
"we are slaves to the cost of living."
"There is a difference between being poor and being broke. Broke is temporary, and poor is eternal."
"A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members."
"Security, the chief pretense of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head."
"It is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork."
"Poverty is a virtue which one can teach oneself."
"Today they say that we are free, only to be chained in poverty."
"Abject poverty is demeaning, is an assault on the dignity of those that suffer it. In the end it demeans us all. It makes the freedom of all of us less meaningful."
