This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"It is not poverty that causes sorrow, but covetous desires. Deliver yourself from appetite, and you will be free. He who is discontented with things present and allotted, is unskilled in life." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL
"The important question of how poverty is to be abolished is one of the most disturbing problems which agitate modern society." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"Vice is waste of life. Poverty, obedience, and celibacy are the canonical vices." - George Bernard Shaw
"Security, the chief pretense of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head." - George Bernard Shaw
"The greatest of evils, and the worst of crimes, is poverty. Our first duty... is not to be poor." - George Bernard Shaw
"The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man." - George Bernard Shaw
"Be calm in argument; for fierceness makes error a fault, and truth discourtesy. Why should I feel another man’s mistakes more than his sicknesses or poverty? In love I should: but anger is not love, nor wisdom either; therefore gently move. Calmness is great advantage; he that lets another chafe may warm him at his fire, mark all his wand’rings and enjoy his frets, as cunning fencers suffer heat to tire." - George Herbert
"Fell luxury! more perilous to youth than storms or quicksands, poverty or chains." - Hannah More
"However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names...cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends...Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thought. God will see that you do not want society... There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"If you wish to give a man a sense of poverty, give him a thousand dollars. The next hundred dollars he gets will not be worth more than ten that he used to get. Have pity on him. Withhold your gifts." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Poverty is very good in poems, but it is very bad in a house. It is very good in maxims and in sermons, but it is very bad in practical life." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Shame goes with poverty, but confidence with wealth." - Hesiod NULL
"Education, then, beyond all other devices, of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men,-the balance wheel of the social machinery. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich: it prevents being poor. Agrarianism is the revenge of poverty against wealth." - Horace Mann
"Few things in this world trouble people more than poverty, or the fear of poverty; and indeed it is a sore affliction; but, like all other ills that flesh is heir to, it has its antidote, its reliable remedy. The judicious application of industry, prudence, and temperance is a certain cure." - Hosea Ballou
"Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem. We recognize this for Nazi Germany, that the people obeyed Hitler. People obeyed; that was wrong." - Howard Zinn
"Should we welcome the huge growth of the military budget at the expense of health, education, the needs of children, one fifth of whom grow up in poverty? I suggest that a patriotic American who cares for his or her country might act on behalf of a different vision. Instead of being feared for our military prowess, we should want to be respected for our dedication to human rights." - Howard Zinn
"Does the world need more medicine and energy and buildings and food? No. There is enough food and medicine, there are enough resources for all. There is starvation and poverty and widespread disease because of human ignorance, prejudice, and fear. Out of greed and hatred we hoard materials; we create wars over imaginary geographic boundaries and act as if one group of people is truly different from another group somewhere else on the planet." - Jack Kornfield
"Poverty is uncomfortable; but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim." - James A. Garfield
"We can't leave people in abject poverty, so we need to raise the standard of living for eighty percent of the world's people, while bringing it down considerably for the twenty percent who are destroying our natural resources." - Jane Goodall, fully Dame Jane Morris Goodall, born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall
"[The Depression] is not a crisis of poverty, but a crisis of abundance. It is not the harshness and the niggardliness of nature which are oppressing us, but our own incompetence and wrong-headedness which hinder us from making use of the bountifulness of inventive science and cause us to be overwhelmed by its generous fruits." - John Maynard Keynes
"If you seek in the spirit of selfishness, to grasp all as your own, you shall lose all, and be driven out of the world, at last, naked and forlorn, to everlasting poverty and contempt." - Jonathan Edwards
"A cheerful temper, joined with innocence, will make beauty attractive, knowledge delightful, and wit good natured. It will lighten sickness, poverty and affliction; convert ignorance into an amiable simplicity, and render deformity itself agreeable." - Joseph Addison
"Sorrow and poverty purify man’s heart; though our weak minds see nothing worthy in the universe save ease and happiness." - Kahlil Gibran
"Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is ours only when we have it - when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed... In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come to be the sheer alienation of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being has been reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world." - Karl Marx
"A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search for truth and perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life... Variation, experiment and insurgence are all of them attributes of freedom." - Lewis Mumford
"Anticipate charity by preventing poverty; assist the reduced fellow man, either by a considerable gift or a sum of money or by teaching him a trade or by putting him in the way of business so that he may earn an honest livelihood and not be forced to the dreadful alternative of holding out his hand for charity. This is the highest step and summit of charity's golden ladder." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
"Why were we able to put hundreds of thousands of troops and support personnel in Saudi Arabia within a few months to fight Saddam Hussein when we are unable to mobilize hundreds of teachers or doctors and nurses and social workers for desperately underserved inner cities and rural areas to fight the tyranny of poverty and ignorance and child neglect and abuse?" - Marian Wright Edelman
"Where wealth is, there are also all manner of sins; for through wealth comes pride, through pride dissension, through dissension wars, through wars, poverty, through poverty, great distress and misery. Therefore, they that are rich, must yield a strict and great account; for to whom much is given, of him much will be required." - Martin Luther
"Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self." - May Sarton, pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton
"Poverty is expensive to maintain." - Michael Harrington, fully Edward Michael "Mike" Harrington
"There are tens of millions of Americans who are beyond the welfare state. Taken as a whole there is a culture of poverty... bad health, poor housing, low levels of aspiration and high levels of mental distress. Twenty per cent of a nation, some 32,000,000." - Michael Harrington, fully Edward Michael "Mike" Harrington
"Anticipate charity by preventing poverty." - Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
"The fruit of desire is poverty." - Moses ibn Ezra, fully Rabbi Moses ben Jacob ibn Ezra, known as ha-Sallah "Writer of penitential prayers"
"There is hunger for ordinary bread, and there is hunger for love, for kindness, for thoughtfulness; and this is the great poverty that makes people suffer so much." - Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu NULL
"Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat." - Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu NULL
"Let us more and more insist on raising funds of love, of kindness, of understanding, of peace. Money will come if we seek first the Kingdom of God - the rest will be given." - Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu NULL
"Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted are the most terrible poverty." - Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu NULL
"There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge - both poverty and riches are offspring of thought." - Napoleon Hill
"I take him to be the only rich man that lives upon what he has, owes nothing, and is contented; for there is no determinate sum of money, nor quantity of estate that can denote a man rich, since no man is truly rich that has not so much as perfectly satiates his desire for having more; for the desire of more is want, and want is poverty." - Nathaniel Howe
"We speak here of the challenge of the dichotomies of war and peace, violence and non-violence, racism and human dignity, oppression and repression and liberty and human rights, poverty and freedom from want." - Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
"Peace will never be entirely secure until men everywhere have learned to conquer poverty without sacrificing liberty or security." - Norman Thomas, fully Norman Mattoon Thomas
"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." - Pericles NULL
"The real disgrace of poverty [is] not in owning to the fact but in declining to struggle against it." - Pericles NULL
"Poverty is dishonorable, not in itself, but when it is a proof of laziness, intemperance, luxury, and carelessness; whereas in a person that is temperate, industrious, just and valiant, and who uses all his virtues for the public good, it shows a great and lofty mind." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"The world has a way of giving what is demanded of it. If you are frightened and look for failure and poverty, you will get them, no matter how hard you may try to succeed. Lack of faith in yourself, in what life will do for you, cuts you off from the good things of the world. Expect victory and you make victory. Nowhere is this truer than in business life, where bravery and faith bring both material and spiritual rewards." - Preston Bradley
"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." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
"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." - Ralph Waldo Emerson