This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"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!" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Poverty consists in feeling poor." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"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." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"All the riches of the world and the glory of creation, compared with the wealth of God, are extreme and abject poverty." - Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL
"Patience reaps peace, and rashness regret; the former riches, the latter poverty." - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
"He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have. Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty." - Socrates NULL
"Wisdom adorns riches, and shadows poverty." - Socrates NULL
"Debt is the worst poverty." - Thomas Fuller
"Poverty is not a Shame, but being ashamed of it is." - Thomas Fuller
"Poverty is not a shame, but the being ashamed of it." - Thomas Fuller
"An avowal of poverty is no disgrace to any man; to make no effort to escape it is indeed disgraceful." - Thucydides NULL
"It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar, that, whenever we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation - of loneliness, poverty, and misery, the end and extreme of things - the thought of God comes into one's mind." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"Work banishes those three great evils: Boredom, vice and poverty." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"The satisfaction with your work, even at its best, will never be complete, since nothing on earth can be perfect. The forward pace of the world which you are pushing will be painfully slow. But what of that: the difference between a hundred and a thousand years is less than you now think. But doing what must be done – that is eternal, even when it walks with poverty." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"The wealth of a soul is measured by how much it can feel; its poverty by how little." - William Rounseville Alger
"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind... the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. " - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of the mind is irreparable." - D. A. Battista, fully Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano
"Living simply is not about living in poverty or self-inflicted deprivation. It's about living an examined life where one has determined what is truly important and enough … and then just let go of all the rest." - Duane Elgin
"We must be afraid of neither poverty nor exile nor imprisonment; of fear itself only should we be afraid." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL
"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." - Fidel Castro, fully Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
"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. " - Freeman John Dyson
"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." - Gustavo Gutiérrez
"Luxury! more perilous to youth than storms or quicksand, poverty or chains." - Hannah More
"The government's War on Poverty has transformed poverty from a short-term misfortune into a career choice. " - Harry Browne, fully Harry Edson Browne
"Remember that those who attack are poor. Their poverty asks for gifts, not further impoverishment." - Helen Schucman, born Helen Cohn
"As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness" - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"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." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"When one uses another for psychological purposes, then exploitation begins. All exploitation is based on psychological poverty of being. There will be no exploitation of man by man when this poverty of being is understood. Exploitation will not cease through mere legislation. There will be exploitation in different forms - at home, in public - as long as this psychological emptiness exists. You will be content with little, with the necessities of life, when you are inwardly rich." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Wealth is conspicuous, but poverty hides." - James Barrett Reston, nicknamed "Scotty"
"A doctrine of class war seemed to provide a solution to the problem of poverty to people who know nothing about how wealth is created. " - Jeane Kirkpatrick
"It is easy enough to say that poverty is no crime. No; if it were men wouldn't be ashamed of it. It is a blunder, though, and is punished as such. A poor man is despised the whole world ove" - Jerome K. Jerome, fully Jerome Klapka Jerome
"Such is friendship, that through it we love places and seasons; for as bright bodies emit rays to a distance, and flowers drop their sweet leaves on the ground around them, so friends impart favor even to the places where they dwell. With friends even poverty is pleasant. Words cannot express the joy which a friend imparts; they only can know who have experienced. A friend is dearer than the light of heaven, for it would be better for us that the sun were exhausted than that we should be without friends." - John Chrysotom
"When poverty comes in at doors, love leaps out at windows." - John Clarke
"Never before has man had such capacity to control his own environment, to end thirst and hunger, to conquer poverty and disease, to banish illiteracy and massive human misery. We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world – or to make it the last. " - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
"Poverty is not wholly a personal failure. It also represents the failure of an economic system. And the remedy is not wholly one of charity, but of political and economic action. Poverty is a reflection also no those who are not poor." - Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson
"Much has been said of the aesthetic values of chanoyu- the love of the subdued and austere- most commonly characterized by the term, wabi. Wabi originally suggested an atmosphere of desolation, both in the sense of solitariness and in the sense of the poverty of things. In the long history of various Japanese arts, the sense of wabi gradually came to take on a positive meaning to be recognized for its profound religious sense. ...the related term, sabi,... It was mid-winter, and the water's surface was covered with the withered leaves of the of the lotuses. Suddenly I realized that the flowers had not simply dried up, but that they embodied, in their decomposition, the fullness of life that would emerge again in their natural beauty." -
"On this International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, let us recognize that extreme poverty anywhere is a threat to human security everywhere. Let us recall that poverty is a denial of human rights. For the first time in history, in this age of unprecedented wealth and technical prowess, we have the power to save humanity from this shameful scourge. Let us summon the will to do it." - Kofi Annan, fully Kofi Atta Annan
"Borrowed thoughts, like borrowed money, only show the poverty of the borrower." - Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, Lady Blessington, born Margaret Power
"If it were really possible to substitute credit expansion (cheap money) for the accumulation of capital goods by saving, there would not be any poverty in the world." - Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
"In early childhood you may lay the foundation of poverty or riches, industry or idleness, good or evil, by the habits to which you train your children. Teach them right habits then, and their future life is safe." - Lydia Sigourney, fully Lydia Huntley Sigourney, née Lydia Howard Huntley
"As on the highroad he who walks lightest walks with most ease, so on the journey of life more happiness comes from lightening the needs by poverty than from panting under a burden of wealth." - Maracus Minucius Felix
"Don’t be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there’s no poverty to be seen because the poverty’s been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don’t be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there’s no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they’ll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces." - Jean-Paul Marat
"But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change. The large house in which we live demands that we transform this world-wide neighborhood into a world – wide brotherhood. Together we must learn to live as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools. We must work passionately and indefatigably to bridge the gulf between our scientific progress and our moral progress. One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Teachers have a huge responsibility for developing the language of their pupils, both spoken and written. I do not believe that teacher-training puts enough emphasis on this, nor on the connection between linguistic poverty and behaviour. Teachers have to tackle both together, and must be ready themselves to articulate the limits they will impose on rudeness, violence and disregard for the feeling and interests of others. If teachers are not explicitly to introduce, by precept and example, the basic rules of civilised, morally good behaviour, then they should quickly leave the profession." - Mary Warnock, fully Helen Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock
"May I not forget that poverty and riches are of the spirit. Though the world knows me not, may my thoughts and actions be such as will keep me friendly with myself." - Max Ehrmann
"Clothes make the poor invisible. America has the best-dressed poverty the world has ever known." - Michael Harrington, fully Edward Michael "Mike" Harrington