“A society is not defined as developed by the wealth it has but by the poverty it doesn’t have.”
Ciencia Política newspaper, Buenos Aires, (2008)
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Jorge Majfud 21
Uruguayan-American writer 1969Related quotes
“The safest wealth is the poverty of needs.”
Der sicherste Reichtum ist die Armut an Bedürfnissen.
Zwischen oben und unten (1946), p. 315
1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)
Context: The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty. The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for "the least of these". Deeply etched in the fiber of our religious tradition is the conviction that men are made in the image of God and that they are souls of infinite metaphysical value, the heirs of a legacy of dignity and worth. If we feel this as a profound moral fact, we cannot be content to see men hungry, to see men victimized with starvation and ill health when we have the means to help them. The wealthy nations must go all out to bridge the gulf between the rich minority and the poor majority.
“… a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…”
Simon, H. A. (1971) "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World" in: Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore. MD: The Johns Hopkins Press. pp. 40–41.
1960s-1970s
Context: In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
Source: Dragon's Egg (1980), Chapter 1, “Prologue” Section 4 (p. 7)
Source: Organizational cybernetics and human values (1969), p. 7
“Beware Democracy without Liberty” https://fee.org/articles/beware-democracy-without-liberty/, Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), (April 1, 2005)
“If either wealth or poverty are come by honesty, there is no shame.”
“All this [wealth] excludes but one evil,—poverty.”
1777
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Life of Johnson (Boswell)
“Contentment is natural wealth; luxury, artificial poverty.”
As reported by Charles Simmons in A Laconic Manual and Brief Remarker, containing over a thousand subjects alphabetically and systematically arranged (North Wrentham, Mass. 1852), p. 103 http://books.google.de/books?id=YOAyAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA103&dq=socrates. However, the original source of this statement is unknown.
Cf. Joseph Addison in The Spectator No. 574 Friday, July 30, 1714, p. 655 http://books.google.de/books?id=K1cdAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA655&dq=socrates: In short, content is equivalent to wealth, and luxury to poverty; or, to give the thought a more agreeable turn, "content is natural wealth," says Socrates: to which I shall add, "luxury is artificial poverty.".
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