
“The goal to strive for is a poor government but a rich people.”
As quoted in Andrew Johnson, Plebeian and Patriot (1928) by Robert Watson Winston
Quote
Fourth Annual Message (3 December 1888)
Context: Communism is a hateful thing and a menace to peace and organized government; but the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil, which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wild disorder the citadel of rule.
He mocks the people who proposes that the Government shall protect the rich and that they in turn will care for the laboring poor. Any intermediary between the people and their Government or the least delegation of the care and protection the Government owes to the humblest citizen in the land makes the boast of free institutions a glittering delusion and the pretended boon of American citizenship a shameless imposition.
“The goal to strive for is a poor government but a rich people.”
As quoted in Andrew Johnson, Plebeian and Patriot (1928) by Robert Watson Winston
Quote
"Lost Labor Love" (p.172)
So This Is Depravity (1980)
The 5,000 Year Leap (1981)
“I don’t care how poor someone thinks he is – if he has a loving family, he is rich beyond measure.”
1790s, Letter to the Addressers (1792)
Context: It is from a strange mixture of tyranny and cowardice that exclusions have been set up and continued. The boldness to do wrong at first, changes afterwards into cowardly craft, and at last into fear. The Representatives in England appear now to act as if they were afraid to do right, even in part, lest it should awaken the nation to a sense of all the wrongs it has endured. This case serves to shew that the same conduct that best constitutes the safety of an individual, namely, a strict adherence to principle, constitutes also the safety of a Government, and that without it safety is but an empty name. When the rich plunder the poor of his rights, it becomes an example of the poor to plunder the rich of his property, for the rights of the one are as much property to him as wealth is property to the other and the little all is as dear as the much. It is only by setting out on just principles that men are trained to be just to each other; and it will always be found, that when the rich protect the rights of the poor, the poor will protect the property of the rich. But the guarantee, to be effectual, must be parliamentarily reciprocal.
“Foreign aid goes from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.”
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/04/03/rand_paul_foreign_aid_goes_from_poor_people_in_rich_countries_to_rich_people_in_poor_countries.html, University of Kentucky, 3-27-2013.
2010s
Saadi as translated in The Gulistān : Or, Rose-garden, of Shek̲h̲ Muslihu'd-dīn Sādī of Shīrāz as translated by Edward Backhouse Eastwick (1880), p. 203.
Misattributed
2015, Speech: Declaration as Vice Presidential Candidate
“The poor object to being governed badly, while the rich object to being governed at all.”
As quoted in Grace at the Table : Ending Hunger in God's World (1999) by David M. Beckmann abd Arthur R. Simon, p. 156