“That the young rich smell the stink of the poor and learn to find it a bit amusing. They had to laugh, otherwise it would be too terrifying.”
Source: Ham on Rye
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Charles Bukowski 555
American writer 1920–1994Related quotes

“When the poor give to the rich, the devil laughs.”
http://books.google.com/books?id=j5kpAQAAIAAJ&q=%22When+the+poor+give+to+the+rich+the+devil+laughs%22&pg=PA64#v=onepage
Quando il povero dona al ricco il Diavolo se ne ride?
http://books.google.com/books?id=UfkHAAAAQAAJ&q=%22Quando+il+povero+dona+al+ricco+il+Diavolo+se+ne+ride%22&pg=PA59#v=onepage
Autobiography, vol. 1, ch. 4

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)
Context: In many myths, the one possibility the gods are most anxious about is that humans will discover some secret of immortality or even... attempt to stride the high heavens.... It's a little bit like the rich imposing poverty on the poor and then asking to be loved because of it.

“You see, when I was young, people used to say the poor had too many children.”
Or, at the time of the famine in Ireland, they would say that the Irish had too many children. We were taking the food from Ireland, and the Irish were starving, and we said they were starving because they had too many children. Now we who are sated, who have to adopt the most extravagant and ridiculous devices to consume what we produce, while watching whole vast populations getting hungrier and hungrier, overcome our feelings of guilt by persuading ourselves that these others are too numerous, have too many children.
They ask for bread and we give them contraceptives!
In future history books it will be said, and it will be a very ignoble entry, that just at the moment in our history when we, through our scientific and technical ingenuity, could produce virtually as much food as we wanted to, just when we were opening up and exploring the universe, we set up a great whimpering and wailing, and said there were too many people in the world. It's pitiful.
In response to the eugenic question, http://books.google.com/books?id=pV0eAQAAIAAJ&q=%22eugenic+question%22+overpopulation&dq=%22eugenic+question%22+overpopulation&hl=en&sa=X&ei=V1hcVN_dH4aoyAS-94LADQ&ved=0CDQQ6AEwBAWhat "What about overpopulation?" Seeing Through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith (2005), Cecil Kuhne (Ed.), introduction by William F. Buckley, Jr., Ignatius Press, ISBN 1586170686 ISBN 9781586170684p. 227. http://books.google.com/books?id=vTFa4eHUw4UC&pg=PA227&dq=%22when+I+was+young,+people+used+to+say+the+poor+had+too+many+children%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=NXRQVOjiDcqAygTX2YCYBA&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22when%20I%20was%20young%2C%20people%20used%20to%20say%20the%20poor%20had%20too%20many%20children%22&f=false

The Guardian [UK] (20 November 1991)

Address on Latin American Policy before the Southern Commercial Congress http://books.google.com/books?id=_VYEIml1cAkC&q=%22I+would+rather+belong+to+a+poor+nation+that+was+free+than+to+a+rich+nation+that+had+ceased+to+be+in+love+with+liberty%22&pg=PA20#v=onepage Mobile, Alabama (27 October 1913)
1910s

Reflections on his earlier life, written when he was 27 (December 1862), published in Letters and Journal of W. Stanley Jevons (1886), edited by Harriet A. Jevons, his wife, p. 11.
Context: When quite young I can remember I had no thought or wish of surpassing others. I was rather taken with a liking of little arts and bits of learning. My mother carefully fostered a liking for botany, giving me a small microscope and many books, which I yet have. Strange as it may seem, I now believe that botany and the natural system, by exercising discrimination of kinds, is the best of logical exercises. What I may do in logic is perhaps derived from that early attention to botany.

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 269