Quotes on Poor

I know what it means to go to the stream to fetch water... what it means when people are poor and don't have enough to eat. It's not enough to say you know about poverty. You have to live it.

People may come to our communities because they want to serve the poor; they will only stay once they have discovered that they themselves are poor.

Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling, when a day of our life comes and we say, 'To-morrow, success or failure won't matter much; and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil.'

When you are weary of praying, and do not receive, consider how often you have heard a poor man calling, and have not listened to him.

Poor people never, or hardly ever, ask for an explanation of all they have to put up with. They hate one another, and content themselves with that.

Failure and its accompanying misery is for the artist his most vital source of creative energy.

REJECT ALL FORMS OF CORRUPTION THAT DIVERT RESOURCES FROM THE POOR

In progressive societies the concentration[of wealth] may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.

Have you never been moved by poor men's fidelity, the image of you they form in their simple minds? Why should you always talk of their envy, without understanding that what they ask of you is not so much your worldly goods, as something very hard to define, which they themselves can put no name to; yet at times it consoles their loneliness; a dream of splendor, of magnificence, a tawdry dream, a poor man's dream -and yet God blesses it!

The poor get bored the same as the rest of us. Their happiness might be as important to them as their health.

I believe it is possible to bring an end to mass incarceration and birth a new moral consensus about how we ought to be responding to poor folks of color and a consensus in support of basic human rights for all. But it is going to take some work.

He mocks the people who proposes that the government shall protect the rich and that they in turn will care for the laboring poor.

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down, Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town.

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest.

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month's rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene.

No man dares to condemn the Christian faith today, because the Christian faith has not been tried. Not until men get rid of the thought that it is a poor machine, an expedient for saving them from suffering and pain; not until they get the grand idea of it as the great power of God present in and through the lives of men; not until then does Christianity enter upon its true trial and become ready to show what it can do.

For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.

If every man took only what was sufficient for his needs, leaving the rest to those in want, there would be no rich and no poor.

My people are still poor. They're still working class. All of the characters that I write about are inspired by the community that I'm from.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice.