“The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.”
Preface
1900s, Major Barbara (1905)
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George Bernard Shaw 413
Irish playwright 1856–1950Related quotes
“Poverty is the mother of crime.”
Mater criminum necessitas tollitur.
Bk. 9, no. 13; translation from S. Giora Shoham and Gill Sher (eds.) The Many Faces of Crime and Deviance (White Plains, N.Y.: Sheridan House, 1983) p. 32.
Variae
“Poverty is the worst kind of violence.”
Quoted without reference to earlier source, time or location in A Just Peace through Transformation: Cultural, Economic, and Political Foundations for Change (1988) by the International Peace Association
Disputed
“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”
Book II, Section VI ( translation http://archive.org/stream/aristotlespolit00aris#page/69/mode/1up by Benjamin Jowett)
Politics
Context: One would have thought that it was even more necessary to limit population than property; and that the limit should be fixed by calculating the chances of mortality in the children, and of sterility in married persons. The neglect of this subject, which in existing states is so common, is a never-failing cause of poverty among the citizens; and poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.
“Poverty puts crime at a discount.”
La pauvreté met le crime au rabais.
Maximes et Pensées (Van Bever, Paris :1923), #312
Reflections; alternately translated as: "Poverty sets a reduced price on crime"; in The Viking Book of Aphorisms (1962).
“The evils of poverty are not barren, but procreative”
Source: Poverty (1912), p. v
Context: The evils of poverty are not barren, but procreative, and... the workers in poverty, are in spite of themselves, giving to the world a litter of miserables, whose degeneracy is so stubborn and fixed that reclamation is almost impossible, especially when the only process of reclamation must consist in trying to force the pauper, vagrant, and weakling back into that struggle with poverty which is all of the time defeating stronger and better natures than theirs.
“Evil is thou', and the worst evil is thou', which thou knowest it not.”
Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 96
“… but now the worst crime was pretending to be something you were not.”
Source: Incantation
“His worst crime was that he gave no hope to the young.”
The Corrupt Presidency, p. 273 (See also: Richard M. Nixon..)
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)