Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Edwin Markham

Three were the fates, - gaunt poverty that chains, gray drudgery that grinds the hope away, and gaping ignorance that starves the soul.

Hope | Ignorance | Poverty | Soul |

George Bernard Shaw

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

Happy | Man | Mistake | Poverty | Sound |

Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The important question of how poverty is to be abolished is one of the most disturbing problems which agitate modern society.

Important | Poverty | Problems | Question | Society |

Hannah More

Fell luxury! more perilous to youth than storms or quicksands, poverty or chains.

Luxury | Poverty | Youth | Youth |

Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names...cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends...Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thought. God will see that you do not want society... There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

Change | God | Life | Life | Poverty | Society | Thought | Will | Trouble | God |

Horace Mann

Education, then, beyond all other devices, of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men,-the balance wheel of the social machinery. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich: it prevents being poor. Agrarianism is the revenge of poverty against wealth.

Balance | Better | Education | Men | Poverty | Revenge | Wealth |

Jack Kornfield

Does the world need more medicine and energy and buildings and food? No. There is enough food and medicine, there are enough resources for all. There is starvation and poverty and widespread disease because of human ignorance, prejudice, and fear. Out of greed and hatred we hoard materials; we create wars over imaginary geographic boundaries and act as if one group of people is truly different from another group somewhere else on the planet.

Disease | Energy | Enough | Fear | Greed | Ignorance | Need | People | Poverty | Prejudice | World |

Howard Zinn

Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem. We recognize this for Nazi Germany, that the people obeyed Hitler. People obeyed; that was wrong.

Cruelty | People | Poverty | Stupidity | War | World | Wrong |

Jonathan Edwards

If you seek in the spirit of selfishness, to grasp all as your own, you shall lose all, and be driven out of the world, at last, naked and forlorn, to everlasting poverty and contempt.

Contempt | Poverty | Selfishness | Spirit | World |

Joseph Addison

A cheerful temper, joined with innocence, will make beauty attractive, knowledge delightful, and wit good natured. It will lighten sickness, poverty and affliction; convert ignorance into an amiable simplicity, and render deformity itself agreeable.

Affliction | Beauty | Good | Ignorance | Innocence | Knowledge | Poverty | Simplicity | Temper | Will | Wit | Beauty |

Karl Marx

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is ours only when we have it - when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed... In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come to be the sheer alienation of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being has been reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world.

Absolute | Alienation | Object | Order | Poverty | Property | Sense | Wealth | World |

Kahlil Gibran

Sorrow and poverty purify man’s heart; though our weak minds see nothing worthy in the universe save ease and happiness.

Heart | Man | Nothing | Poverty | Sorrow | Universe |

Marian Wright Edelman

Why were we able to put hundreds of thousands of troops and support personnel in Saudi Arabia within a few months to fight Saddam Hussein when we are unable to mobilize hundreds of teachers or doctors and nurses and social workers for desperately underserved inner cities and rural areas to fight the tyranny of poverty and ignorance and child neglect and abuse?

Abuse | Ignorance | Neglect | Poverty | Tyranny | Child |

May Sarton, pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.

Loneliness | Poverty | Self | Solitude |

Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu NULL

There is hunger for ordinary bread, and there is hunger for love, for kindness, for thoughtfulness; and this is the great poverty that makes people suffer so much.

Hunger | Kindness | Love | People | Poverty |

Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

We speak here of the challenge of the dichotomies of war and peace, violence and non-violence, racism and human dignity, oppression and repression and liberty and human rights, poverty and freedom from want.

Challenge | Freedom | Liberty | Oppression | Poverty | Right | Time | War |

Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu NULL

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.

Hunger | Nothing | Poverty | Think |

Napoleon Hill

There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge - both poverty and riches are offspring of thought.

Mind | Poverty | Riches | Thought | Riches |

Norman Thomas, fully Norman Mattoon Thomas

Peace will never be entirely secure until men everywhere have learned to conquer poverty without sacrificing liberty or security.

Liberty | Men | Peace | Poverty | Security | Will |