This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The real disgrace of poverty [is] not in owning to the fact but in declining to struggle against it.
Not to be able to bear poverty is a shameful thing; but not to know how to chase it away by work is a more shameful thing yet.
The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss.
Enough | Greatness | Justice | Need | Perception | Plenty | Poverty | Soul | Virtue | Virtue |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself, tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches; since for the Creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place.
Wealth and poverty are seen for what they are. IT begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel poor, and poverty consists in feeling poor. The rich, as we reckon them, and among them the very rich, in a true scale would be found very indigent and ragged.
Eyes are bold as lions, roving, running, leaping, here and there, far and near. They speak all languages; they wait for no introduction; they are no Englishmen; ask no leave of age or rank; they respect neither poverty nor riches, neither learning nor power, nor virtue, nor sex, but intrude, and come again, and go through and through you in a moment of time. What inundation of life and thought is discharged from one soul into another through them!
Age | Learning | Life | Life | Poverty | Power | Rank | Respect | Riches | Soul | Thought | Time | Virtue | Virtue | Respect | Thought |
D. A. Battista, fully Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano
Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of the mind is irreparable.
We must be afraid of neither poverty nor exile nor imprisonment; of fear itself only should we be afraid.
Fidel Castro, fully Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
The ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry but they cannot kill ignorance, illnesses, poverty or hunger.
The most revolutionary aspect of technology is its mobility. Anybody can learn it. It jumps easily over barriers of race and language. … The new technology of microchips and computer software is learned much faster than the old technology of coal and iron. It took three generations of misery for the older industrial countries to master the technology of coal and iron. The new industrial countries of East Asia, South Korea, and Singapore and Taiwan, mastered the new technology and made the jump from poverty to wealth in a single generation.
Computer | Poverty | Race | Technology | Wealth | Learn | Old |
But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.
Luxury! more perilous to youth than storms or quicksand, poverty or chains.
Harry Browne, fully Harry Edson Browne
The government's War on Poverty has transformed poverty from a short-term misfortune into a career choice.
Misfortune | Poverty | War | Misfortune |
Helen Schucman, born Helen Cohn
Remember that those who attack are poor. Their poverty asks for gifts, not further impoverishment.
Poverty |
Only in relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction and certainly not in isolation. The movement of behavior is the sure guide to yourself. It's the mirror of your consciousness: this mirror will reveal its content, the images, the attachments, the fears, the loneliness, the joys and sorrow. Poverty lies in running away from this, either in its sublimations or its identities.
Behavior | Poverty | Relationship | Will |