
“We know well that there is poverty in Latin America, beyond the beauty of our nations.”
Source: https://www.peruinforma.com/entrevista-cultural-al-escritor-chileno-jose-baroja/
A collection of quotes on the topic of poverty, people, world, other.
“We know well that there is poverty in Latin America, beyond the beauty of our nations.”
Source: https://www.peruinforma.com/entrevista-cultural-al-escritor-chileno-jose-baroja/
“We cannot be naive: the literature book will not solve poverty by itself”
Source: https://www.peruinforma.com/entrevista-cultural-al-escritor-chileno-jose-baroja/
Quoted from his first book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Success_and_Failure_Based_on_Reason_and_Reality, "Success and Failure Based on Reason and Reality" https://www.amazon.co.uk/SUCCESS-FAILURE-BASED-REASON-REALITY/dp/9970983903/ on Amazon, P.58 (July 2018)
“Two things cause people to be destroyed: fear of poverty and seeking superiority through pride.”
Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol. 72, p. 39
Other sources
Source: Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall
Context: Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums. Graffiti has more chance of meaning something or changing stuff than anything indoors. Graffiti has been used to start revolutions, stop wars, and generally is the voice of people who aren't listened to. Graffiti is one of those few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make somebody smile while they're having a piss.
Source: The State and Revolution (1917), Ch. 5
Context: Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the "petty" – supposedly petty – details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for "paupers"!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc., – we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.
Stobaeus, iv. 29a. 19
Quoted by Stobaeus
“Instead of war on poverty,
they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.”
“The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.”
1 POLITICS AND ISSUES, Creating The Poor, p. 21
Dirty truths (1996), first edition
Incorrectly attributed to Foster, according to snopes.com https://www.snopes.com/attacking-the-rich/
Misattributed
Speech at Queen's College, City University of New York (March 12, 1975). "The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage", ch. 5, published in Our Blood (1976).
Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 3
Context: For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent; for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that. You are bored, but you are not afraid. You think vaguely, 'I shall be starving in a day or two--shocking, isn't it?' And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne. And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs--and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.
Interview with Lisa Owen at Newshub Nation, 21 October 2017
“Poverty frees them from normal standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work”
Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 1
Source: Down and Out in Paris and London
Context: The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people — people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from normal standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words.
“You will never become rich, until you hate poverty”
Variant: You will never change your life until you change something you do daily.
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
"Fifth Avenue, Uptown: a Letter from Harlem" in Esquire (July 1960); republished in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)
“Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.”
Source: Ten Years of New Labour edited by Matt Beech and Simon Lee (2008), pp. xvi.
Michael Moore declares these lines in his film Fahrenheit 9/11 as something "Orwell once wrote". They are nearly identical to a block of voiceover in the 1984 Richard Burton/John Hurt movie version of 1984 when Winston (Hurt) is silently reading Goldstein's book. All of the lines are excerpts from various parts of Goldstein's book in part 2, chapter 9 of the novel with some paraphrasing. Note that the fourth sentence begins with "This new version". In Moore's speech there is no antecedent for this phrase; consequently, the sentence makes no sense there. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SVrM2Ef81C7EUSTm4zsgjQk9mgMSeFUnlEvtleR2V1w/edit?usp=sharing http://metabunk.org/threads/debunked-war-is-not-meant-to-be-won-it-is-meant-to-be-continuous.1259/
Misattributed
Article on Wealth
L'Encyclopédie (1751-1766)
Popcorn in Paradise (1980)
Political questionnaire response (1952)
As quoted in Nkrumah, Gamal (1–7 November 2001)
Al-Ahram Weekly interview (2001)
“Virtue with poverty didst thou prefer
To the possession of great wealth with vice.”
Canto XX, lines 26–27 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Purgatorio
“Poverty is a virtue which one can teach oneself.”
Stobaeus, iv. 32a. 19
Quoted by Stobaeus
Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 3
Context: For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent; for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that. You are bored, but you are not afraid. You think vaguely, 'I shall be starving in a day or two--shocking, isn't it?' And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne. And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs--and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.
1960s, The American Promise (1965)
Context: For Negroes are not the only victims. How many white children have gone uneducated, how many white families have lived in stark poverty, how many white lives have been scarred by fear, because we have wasted our energy and our substance to maintain the barriers of hatred and terror? So I say to all of you here, and to all in the Nation tonight, that those who appeal to you to hold on to the past do so at the cost of denying you your future. This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all: black and white, North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are the enemies and not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too, poverty, disease and ignorance, we shall over, come.
“Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum.”
Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 1
Context: I am trying to describe the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all part of the story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some idea of what life was like there.
Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 38
Context: My story ends here. It is a fairly trivial story, and I can only hope that it has been interesting in the same way as a trivial diary is interesting. … At present I do not feel I have seen more than the fringe of poverty.
Still, I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.
"The Power of One", TIME Magazine (26 August 2002) http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1003125,00.html
Knox College Commencement Address (4 June 2005)
2005
Subject: Jane Goodall, primatologist and conservationist http://www.dailysummit.net/says/interview260802.htm, interviewed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (2002)
“He who possesseth little is so much the less possessed. Blessed be moderate poverty!”
“Why, look at me. I've worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.”
“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”
In jail, Cross-Country Kline to Dove Linkhorn.
Source: A Walk on the Wild Side (1956)
Context: But blow wise to this, buddy, blow wise to this: Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own. Never let nobody talk you into shaking another man's jolt. And never you cop another man's plea. I've tried 'em all and I know. They don't work. / Life is hard by the yard, son. But you don't have to do it by the yard. By the inch it's a cinch. And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty.
“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.
“Liberals fought poverty and poverty won.”
As quoted in The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (2004) by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, p. 10
Post-presidency (1989–2004)
2014, Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Town Hall (April 2014)
2016, Remarks to the People of Cuba (March 2016)
Capital and the State (1924)
Inauguration of Library of Birmingham, Jan 2013
“…richness of heart of the poor people [and to despise] the poverty of heart of the rich.”
Baba Amte: A Vision of New India
James Tobin, "Keynes' Policies in Theory and Practice", Challenge (1983).
1970s and later
“One day our grandchildren will go to museums to see what poverty was like.”
"Interview with Prof. Muhammad Yunus" Australian Broadcasting Corporation (25 March 1997) http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/stories/s400630.htm
Remarks of Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama Against Going to War with Iraq (2 October 2002) http://action.barackobama.com/page/share/2002iraqfull; referencing the positions of former Pentagon policy adviser Richard Perle, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and chief Bush political adviser Karl Rove.
2000-03
"The Private Production of Defense" http://www.mises.org/journals/scholar/Hoppe.pdf (15 June 1999)
Letter to Justice William Johnson (12 June 1823)
1820s
“A parents' dissatisfaction causes poverty and leads to humiliation.”
Misnad al-Imām al-Hādī, p. 303.
Religious Wisdom
This passage comes from a letter addressed to his wife. It was written during his imprisonment at the Bastille.
"L’Aigle, Mademoiselle…"
1860s, First State of the Union address (1861)
1910s, The Progressives, Past and Present (1910)
2015, Remarks to the People of Africa (July 2015)
“Biting poverty and cruel Cupid are my foes. Hunger I can endure; love I cannot.”
Paupertas me saeva domat dirusque Cupido:<br/>sed toleranda fames, non tolerandus amor.
Paupertas me saeva domat dirusque Cupido:
sed toleranda fames, non tolerandus amor.
Epigram XV http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Claudian/Carmina_Minora*/omnia.html#XV
Source: Kinski Uncut : The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski (1996), p. 59
Notebook VII, The Chapter on Capital, pp. 628–629.
Grundrisse (1857/58)
Context: The development of fixed capital indicates in still another respect the degree of development of wealth generally, or of capital…
The creation of a large quantity of disposable time apart from necessary labour time for society generally and each of its members (i. e. room for the development of the individuals’ full productive forces, hence those of society also), this creation of not-labour time appears in the stage of capital, as of all earlier ones, as not-labour time, free time, for a few. What capital adds is that it increases the surplus labour time of the mass by all the means of art and science, because its wealth consists directly in the appropriation of surplus labour time; since value directly its purpose, not use value. It is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development. But its tendency always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour...
The mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour. Once they have done so – and disposable time thereby ceases to have an antithetical existence – then, on one side, necessary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all. For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual’s entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour. The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools.
§ 134
2010s, 2015, Laudato si' : Care for Our Common Home
Source: The Works of the Right Reverend George Horne, 1809, p. 310
At the United Nations' 60th summit, 2005-09-16 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4247296.stm
2005
Tous les hommes seraient donc nécessairement égaux, s’ils étaient sans besoins. La misère attachée à notre espèce subordonne un homme à un autre homme: ce n’est pas l’inégalité qui est un malheur réel, c’est la dépendance.
"Equality" (1764)
Citas, Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)
“It is not poverty, Nestor, to have nothing at all.”
Non est paupertas, Nestor, habere nihil.
XI, 32 (Loeb translation).
Epigrams (c. 80 – 104 AD)
“Poverty is the self's greed and increased despair.”
Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.78, p. 368.
General
cf. Mt 25:5ff.
Section 197
2010s, 2013, Evangelii Gaudium · The Joy of the Gospel
Shropshire Conservative (31 August 1844), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume I. 1804–1859 (London: John Murray, 1929), p. 629.
1840s
2014, Sixth State of the Union Address (January 2014)
Knox College Commencement Address (4 June 2005)
2005
“Gratitude is riches. Complaint is poverty.”
Though she is quoted as saying this in a 1996 interview, she is quoted as saying it is a maxim which she follows as a Christian Scientist, and it seems to come from words of a Christian Science Hymn. It does come from Hymn 249 in the Christian Science Hymnal
Misattributed
Retirement speech, April 10, 1907, as reported in the St. Louis [Missouri] Post-Dispatch (April 11, 1907).
Remarks by the President at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, Indonesia November 10, 2010 http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/11/10/remarks-president-university-indonesia-jakarta-indonesia
The line "Prosperity without freedom is just another form of poverty. Because there are aspirations that human beings share - the liberty of knowing that your leader is accountable to you - and that you won't get locked up for disagreeing with them" was according to the BBC's Guy Delauney in Jakarta a thinly-veiled swipe at China, in particular its treatment of political dissidents. See Obama hails Indonesia as example for world, BBC News Asia-Pacific, 10 November 2010 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11723650.
The line "Prosperity without freedom is just another form of poverty" was later repeated by Obama in his remarks to the Australian Parliament on November 17, 2011 http://usrsaustralia.state.gov/us-oz/2011/11/17/wh1.html where Obama stated: "As we grow our economies, we’ll also remember the link between growth and good governance -- the rule of law, transparent institutions, the equal administration of justice. Because history shows that, over the long run, democracy and economic growth go hand in hand. And prosperity without freedom is just another form of poverty."
2010
Book 2.40
History of the Peloponnesian War
Wesleyan Graduation Ceremony, Middletown, Connecticut (25 May 2008) http://www.politico.com/pdf/PPM42_remarks_of_obama.pdf
2008
“There is nothing worse than being ashamed of parsimony or poverty.”
Book XXXIV, sec. 4
History of Rome
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XX Humorous Writings