If you go back to 1800, everybody was poor. I mean everybody. The Industrial Revolution kicked in, and a lot of countries benefited, but by no means everyone.

In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.

Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

Giving a poor person money keeps them poor.

As a kid, I got three meals a day. Oatmeal, miss-a-meal and no meal.

I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.

Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the population into the richest 20% than remain in the poorest bracket within the decade? You don’t need to imagine it. It’s called the United States of America.

When I was an orphan, I was the richest kid at the orphanage because everyone else was complaining about not having anything. But when I discovered that you could get two cents for a Coca-Cola bottle, I would follow people around who were drinking it and ask them if they were almost through with it.

Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.

Countries which receive aid do graduate. Within a generation, Korea went from being a big recipient to being a big aid donor. China used to get quite a bit of aid; now it’s aid-neutral.

Oh, how I would like a poor Church, and for the poor.

All the United States, it is a society that is split like to the bottom, that had very poor people in the country that is one of the wealthiest countries.

There is a noble manner of being poor, and who does not know it will never be rich.

Coming generations will learn equality from poverty, and love from woes.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us – dreamers and indolent… It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich – these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.

Poverty breeds despair. We know this. Despair breeds violence. We know this. In turbulent times, isn’t it cheaper, and smarter, to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later?

You lose your individuality a huge amount when you have no money, and I certainly had that experience.

No one is so miserable as the poor person who maintains the appearance of wealth.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

The poor don’t know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having their own racial or ethnic leaders to follow.

I saw few die of hunger; of eating, a hundred thousand.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

The biggest and most deadly ‚tax‘ rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits – food stamps, housing subsidies and the like – if their income goes up.

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

Poverty is the mother of crime.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.

Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.

Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.

Investing for the poor requires participation from the entire community.

If you’re totally illiterate and living on one dollar a day, the benefits of globalization never come to you.

My family kinda hit the skids. We were experiencing poverty at that point. We all got a job, where the whole family had to work as security guards and janitors. And I just got angry.

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

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

If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end – people like myself – should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it.

You cannot spend money in luxury without doing good to the poor. Nay, you do more good to them by spending it in luxury, than by giving it; for by spending it in luxury, you make them exert industry, whereas by giving it, you keep them idle.

When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.

The lack of money is the root of all evil.

There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.

He is now rising from affluence to poverty.

Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.

The surest way to remain poor is to be an honest man.

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

The old-fashioned idea is that responsibility falls upon those who borrow and lend. Money was not borrowed by campesinos, assembly plant workers, or slum-dwellers. The mass of the population gained little from borrowing, indeed often suffered grievously from its effects.

Progressively saved by the machine from the anxieties that bound his hands and mind to material toil, relieved of a large part of his work and compelled to an ever-increasing speed of action by the devices which his intelligence cannot help ceaselessly creating and perfecting, man is about to find himself abruptly plunged into idleness.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances, invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.

All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.