Great Throughts Treasury

"We should not so much esteem our poverty as a misfortune, were it not that the world treats it so." - John Christian Bovee

"If poverty is the mother of crimes, want of sense is the father of them." - Jean de La Bruyère

"There is nothing keeps longer than a middling fortune, and nothing melts away sooner than a great one. Poverty treads on the heels of great and unexpected riches." - Jean de La Bruyère

"The observation is that, generally speaking, poverty of speech is the outward evidence of poverty of mind" - Bruce Burton

"Poverty is, except where there is an actual want of food an raiment, a thing much more imaginary than real. The shame of poverty - the shame of being though poor - it is a great and fatal weakness, though arising in this country, from the fashion of the times themselves." - William Cobbett

"A greater poverty than that caused by lack of money is the poverty of unawareness. Man and women go about the world unaware of the beauty, the goodness, the glories in it. Their souls are poor. It is better to have a poor pocket-book than to suffer from a poor soul." - Thomas Dreier

"Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor, - all men know something of poverty; not that all men are wicked, - who is good? Not that men are ignorant, - what is truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men." -

"Happiness is not in strength, or wealth, or power, or all three. It lies in ourselves, in true freedom, in the conquest of every ignoble fear, in perfect self-government, in a power of contentment and peace, and the even flow of life, even in poverty, exile, disease, and the very valley of the shadow of death." -

"We must be afraid of neither poverty nor exile nor imprisonment; of fear itself only should we be afraid." -

"Poverty teaches a man to play the villain from necessity." - Euripedes NULL

"Neither great poverty nor great riches will hear reason." - Henry Fielding

"Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty." - Henry Ford

"Poverty often deprives a man of all spirit and virtue. It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright." - Benjamin Franklin

"Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry, all things easy. He that rises late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night, while laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him." - Benjamin Franklin

"True religion teaches us to reverence what is under us, to recognize humility and poverty, and despite mockery and disgrace, wretchedness, suffering, and death as things divine." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The figures prove that the absolute easiest way to be poor is to be born out of wedlock to a young woman. If you need a statistic to memorize, try this one: 92.8 percent of all children in black, single female-headed families where the mother is under thirty and did not complete high school, are in poverty." - Ellen Goodman

"Poverty breeds wealth; and wealth in its turn breeds poverty. The earth, to form the mould, is taken out of the ditch; and whatever may be the height of the one will be the depth of the other." - Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare

"Boredom is the keynote of poverty... for when there is no money there is no change of any kind, not of scene or of routine." - Moss Hart

"Poverty rocks the cradle of all our great men, and remains their faithful companion throughout life." - Heinrich Heine

"[The man is free] who is self-reliant... who masters his passions; who fears neither poverty nor death nor prison; who resists his appetites [and] despises worldly ambition." - Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

"It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness. Poverty and wealth have both failed." -

"The answer to the accumulating casualties of the welfare state’s “war” on poverty is the home-grown, grass-roots, all-volunteer army of ordinary people armed with food, books, skills and a determination to make a difference. The entrepreneurial creativity that catapulted this nation to a position of global leadership can now be harnessed to do for community what it did for productivity. When we provide imaginative, entrepreneurial alternatives to the welfare state, we won’t need to confront it. It will simply wither away. And the rewards of this work are a bounty of spiritual renewal: an abundance of love, meaning and connectedness." - Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

"A propensity to hope and joy is real riches; one to fear and sorrow, real poverty." - David Hume

"To be happy, the temperament must be cheerful and gay, not gloomy and melancholy. A propensity to hope and joy, is real riches; one to fear and sorrow is real poverty." - David Hume

"Poverty curtails individual freedom. So do illiteracy, prejudice, lack of education, inability to obtain the basic needs of life." - Hubert Humphrey, fully Hubert Horatio Humphrey

"One solitary philosopher may be great, virtuous, and happy in the depth of poverty, but not a whole people." - Isaak Iselin

"Poverty has many roots, but the tap root is ignorance." - Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ

"Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, sickness, of captivity, would, without this comfort, be insupportable." -

"It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy without physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art." -

"Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name poverty to the want of superfluities." -

"The inevitable consequence of poverty is dependence." -

"The whole world is put in motion by the wish for riches and the dread of poverty." -

"To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches; and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty fro mothers, and his idleness from himself." -

"To grieve for evils is often wrong; but it is much more wrong to grieve without them. All sorrow that lasts longer than its cause is morbid, and should be shaken off as an attack of melancholy, as the forerunner of a greater evil than poverty or pain." -

"Political sovereignty is but a mockery without the means of meeting poverty and illiteracy and disease. Self-determination is but a slogan if the future holds no hope." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe - the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"A miser is sometimes a grand personification of fear. He has a fine horror of poverty; and he is not content to keep want from the door, or at arm’s length, but he places it by heaping wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance!" - Charles Lamb

"No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty - none less inclined to take, or touch, ought which they have not honestly earned." - Abraham Lincoln

"Poverty at birth has never hampered great minds." - William Maginn, aka Billy Maginn

"Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of mind is irreparable." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

"There is a sort of gratification in doing good which makes us rejoice in ourselves." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

"It is a kind of blindness - poverty. We can only grope through life when we are poor, hitting and maiming ourselves against every angle." - Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL

"That man is to be accounted poor, of whatever rank he be, and suffers the pains of poverty, whose expenses exceed his resources; and no man is, properly speaking, poor, but he." - William Paley, Archdeacon of Saragossa

"To tell the truth, however, family and poverty have done more to support me than I have to support them. They have compelled me to make exertions that I hardly thought myself capable of; and often when on the eve of despairing, they have forced me, like a coward in a corner, to fight like a hero, not for myself, but for my wife and little ones." - Philip Bennett Power

"He is much to be dreaded who stands in dread of poverty." - Publius Syrus

"Poverty is the only load which is the heavier the more loved ones there are to assist in supporting it." -

"Poverty is a noose that strangles humility and breeds disrespect for God and man." - Wilbur Riegert

"There is no excuse for poverty in a society which can spend $80 billion a year on its war machine." - I. F. Stone, fully Isidor Feinstein Stone, born Isidor Feinstein

"Drinking of wine brings poverty, shame, quarrels; leads to calumnious talk, unchastity, murder, and the loss of freedom, of honor, of understanding." - Tosafot or Tosafos NULL

"Poverty cannot debase sturdy souls, nor riches lift up mean ones." -