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 POVERTY . . . see: "HUNGER" see "MONEY" for related links Another good thing about being poor is that when you are seventy your children will not have declared you legally insane in order to gain control of your estate. --Woody Allen [Allen Stewart Konigsberg] (1935— ) American actor, screenwriter, and director. Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor. --James Baldwin (1924—1987) American author and playwright. _Nobody Knows My Name_ [1961] Being kidnapped and held for ransom never worries the poor man. --Bible "Proverbs" 13:8 TLB In the future, welfare will be a hand-up not a hand-out. --Tony Blair(1953— ) British Labour statesman, Prime Minister [1997—2007]. Speech in London [18 March 1999]. Food comes first, then morals. --Bertolt Brecht (1898—1956) German dramatist. _The Threepenny Opera_ [1928], Act II, Scene iii When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food they call me a communist. --attributed to Helder Camara (1909—1999) Brazilian Archbishop. Tonight thousands of people on this earth will die of starvation. Most of you will not give a a shit. And most of you will be more upset with the fact that I said, 'shit' than that thousands of people will die tonight. --Tony Campolo (1935— ) American pastor and author. - Over the hill to the poor-house I'm trudgin' my weary way. --Will Carleton (1845—1912) American poet. "Over the Hill to the Poorhouse" _Farm Ballads_ [1873] also attributed to: --John B. Bogart (1848—1921) American journalist. _Over the Hill to the Poorhouse_, Stanza 1 - I think of a family who started a farm on rocky soil in Kentucky: a dim, shiftless, rolling stone of a husband married to an illegitimate girl from the Virginia mountains. He tried five or six farms and kept moving on, a man afflicted, we'd say today, with a character neurosis who thought that by picking a new place, like a movie actress who keeps picking a new husband, he would somehow change the plot. He didn't, of course. They plodded into Indiana and did a little better. In time, they had a barn and a few animals, a little corral, a rail fence, and they planted corn and flax and beans. But then the neighbors went down with "the milk sickness," picked up from cows that chewed on snakeroot. Our farmer's wife died. So the vagabond father and his dour son moved on to a new state and new ground. the son passing from an almost animal boyhood into a bleak manhood. Yet, out of that frail women and her listless husband and the poorest ground, there came something strange and wholly admirable: the slow-moving son who seized the Republic and held it through its first cataclysm — Abraham Lincoln. --Alistair Cooke [Alfred Cooke] (1908—2004) British-born American broadcater and journalist. _America_ [1973] - - REMEMBER AFRICA We live in a world of light and shade where people suffer and need our aid. Where children starve, their eyes downcast, with legs like sticks they're forced to fast. Do we care enough? Do we care? On TV we've seen them there, babies sucking on dry breasts bare. Once strong fathers giving up hope - with hunger and fear it's hard to cope. Do we care enough? Do we care? Men and women, old and young, walking for miles in the glaring sun. Upright and gaunt they make their way, refugees in the heat of the day. Do we care enough? Do we care? This miserable mass, flying no flags, just bundles of bones clad only in rags; tormented and goaded by fat filthy flies, crawling on faces with tearless dead eyes. Do we care enough? Do we care? When skeletal children stop asking why, and frail old people just lie down and die. When feudal armies plunder and fight, caring nothing for human right. Do we care enough? Do we care? How can we help to ease their pain? Find them water to grow their grain? Care and support is what they need, Not fear and hunger or selfish greed. Do we care enough? Do we care? --Written for Christian Aid by Valerie Copeland - Newcomers to the United States are struck by the amenities enjoyed by "poor" people. This fact was dramatized in the 1980s when CBS television broadcast a documentary, "People Like Us," intended to show the miseries of the poor during an ongoing recession. The Soviet Union also broadcast the documentary, with a view to embarrassing the Reagan administration. But by the testimony of former Soviet leaders, it had the opposite effect. Ordinary people across the Soviet Union saw that the poorest Americans have TV sets, microwave ovens and cars. They arrived at the same perception that I witnessed in an acquaintance of mine from Bombay who has been unsuccessfully trying to move to the United States. I asked him, 'Why are you so eager to come to America?' He replied, 'I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.' --Dinesh D'Souza (1961— ) American author. "10 things to celebrate: Why I'm an anti-anti-American" Poverty has this defect: it prompts a man to evil deeds. --Euripides (485? — 406 B.C.) Greek dramatist. _Electra_ [413 BC] Neither great poverty nor great riches will hear reason. --Henry Fielding (1707-1754) English novelist and dramatist. They [the poor] have to labor in the face of the majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. --Anatole France [Jacques Anatole Thibault] (1844—1924) French novelist, man of letters, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. _Le Lys rouge_ {1894] - I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer. --Benjamin Franklin (1706—1790) American politician, inventor, and scientist. "The Encouragement of Idleness" [1766] Light purse, heavy heart. --Benjamin Franklin (1706—1790) American politician, inventor, and scientist. _Poor Richard's Almanack_ [1733] - The children who go to bed hungry in a Harlem slum or a West Virgina mining town are not being deprived because no food can be found to give them; they are going to bed hungry because, despite all our miracles of invention and production, we have not yet found a way to make the necessities of life available to all of our citizens — including those whose failure is not a lack of personal industry or initiative, but only an unwise choice of parents. --J. William Fulbright (1905—1995) American politician. _Old Myths and New Realities_ [1964] An empty purse frightens away friends. --Thomas Fuller (1654—1734) English writer and physician. _Gnomologia_ [1732] Great numbers of sturdy beggars, loose and vagrant Persons, infest the Nation, but no place more than the city of London and parts adjacent. If any person is born with any defect or deformity, or maimed by fire or othe casualty, or any inverterate distemper, which renders them miserable objects, their way is open to London, where they have free liberty of showing their nauseous sights to terrify people, and force them to give money to get rid of them; and those vagrants have for many years past moved out of several parts of the three kingdoms, and taken their station in the metropolis, to the interruption of conversation and business. --Joshua Gee _The Trade and Navigation of Great Britain Considered_ [1729] p. 41 Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law. --Oliver Goldsmith (1728—1774) Anglo-Irish writer, poet, and dramatist. _The Traveller_ [1764] Brother can you spare a dime? --E.Y. "Yip" Harburg (1896—1981) American songwriter. [Title of 1932 song] If a man can look out his window and see another house, he's a poor man. --Sylvan Hart American woodsman. I want there to be no peasant in my kingdom so poor that he is unable to have a chicken in his pot every Sunday. --Henri IV [Henry of Naverre] (1553—1610) King of France [1589—1610]. In Hardouin de Péréfixe _Histoire de Henry le Grand_ [1681]. - When I was running about this town a very poor fellow, I was a great arguer for the advantages of poverty; but I was, at the same time, very sorry to be poor. Sir, all the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil, shew it to be a great evil. You never find people labouring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful fortune. — So you hear people talking how miserable a King must be; and yet they all wish to be in his place. --Samuel Johnson (1709—1784) English poet, critic, and lexicographer. In James Boswell _Life of Samuel Johnson_ [1791]. Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult. --Samuel Johnson (1709—1784) English poet, critic, and lexicographer. Letter to Boswell [7 December 1782]. - There's nothing surer, The rich get richer and the poor get children. --Gus Kahn (1886-1941) & Raymond B. Egan (1890-1952) American songwriters, "Ain't We Got Fun" [1921 song] If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. --John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917—1963) American Democratic statesman, President of the U.S. [1961—1963]. Inaugural address [20 January 1961]. The poor we have always with us, and the purpose of the Lord in providing the poor is to enable us of the better classes to amuse ourselves by investigating them and uplifting them and at dinners telling how charitable we are. The poor don't like it much. They have no gratitude. ...But if they are taken firmly in hand they can be kept reasonably dependent and interesting for years. --Sinclair Lewis (1885—1951) American novelist and playwright. In the short story _Things_ first published in the "Saturday Evening Post" [1919]. Of what use is political liberty to those who have no bread? It is of value only to ambitious theorists and politicians. --Jean-Paul Marat (1743—1793) French politician, physician, and journalist, a leader of the radical Montagnard faction during the French revolution. Letter to Camille Desmoulins [24 June 1790]. Poverty is the mother of crime. --Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121—180) Roman emperor [161—180] and Stoic philosopher. Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed. --Herman Melville (1819—1891) American novelist and poet. "Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs," _Harper's Magazine_ [1854] The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor. --H.L. (Henry Louis) Mencken (1880—1956) American journalist and literary critic. I never saw a beggar yet who would recognize guilt if it bit him on his unwashed ass. --Tony Parsons (1953— ) British critic and writer. _Dispatches from the Front Line of Popular Culture_ [1994] As society advances, the standard of poverty rises. --James Barrett "Scotty" Reston (1909—1995) Scottish-born American journalist; two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for reporting. - "A most variable climate," said the Duchess; "and how unfortunate that we should have had that very cold weather at a time when coal was so dear! So distressing for the poor." "Some one has observed that Providence is always on the side of the big dividends," remarked Reginald. The Duchess ate an anchovy in a shocked manner; she was sufficiently old-fashioned to dislike irreverence towards dividends. --Saki [Hector Hugh Munro] (1870—1916) Scottish writer. "Reginald at the Carlton" - The real disgrace of poverty is not in owning to the fact but in declining to struggle against it. --Thucydides (c.460—c.400 B.C.) Greek historian of Athens. "Pericles' Funeral Oration" I've never been poor, only broke. Being poor is a frame of mind. Being broke is only a temporary situation. --Mike Todd [Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen] (1909—1958) American film producer. The more is given the less people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase. --Leo Tolstoy (1828—1910) Russian novelist. _Help for the Starving_ [1892] No one can love his neighbor on an empty stomach. --Woodrow Wilson (1856—1924) American Democratic statesman and President [1913—1921]. In a speech in New York City [23 May 1912]. - She was poor but she was honest, Victim of a rich man's game. First he loved her, then he left her, And she lost her maiden name. . . . It's the same the whole world over. It's the poor wot gets the blame, It's the rich wot gets the gravy. Ain't it all a bleedin' shame? --anon., "She was Poor but she was Honest," sung by British soldiers in WWI. We expressly prohibit and forbid all persons of either sex, of any locality and of any age, of whatever breeding and birth, and in whatever condition they may be, able-bodied or invalid, sick or convalescent, curable or incurable, to beg in the city and suburbs of Paris. . . under pain of being whipped for the first offense, and for the second condemned to the galleys if men and boys, banished if women and girls. --Parlement of Paris, Edict (7) [1657] When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out the window. --Saying [17th century] TOPICAL ...The number of people living in poverty has been in a narrow range of 32 million to 37 million for the past 25 years. The 1991 recession briefly pushed the number of poor people up to 39 million; the 1995-99 economic boom shrank it to 31.6 million. [ . . . ] A University of Michigan study discovered that one out of three U.S. households experience poverty in at least one year of a 13-year stretch. But only one out of 20 families were poor in at least 10 years, and only one out of 60 stayed poor in all 13 years. Hence, the permanent poverty rate is less than 2 percent, even though the annual poverty rate is closer to 13 percent. [ . . . ] --Bradley R. Schiller _The Washington Post_ [September 2006] ----- hardscrabble [HARD-skrab-uhl], adjective: 1. Yielding a bare or meager living with great labor or difficulty. 2. Marked by poverty. impecunious [im-pih-KYOO-nee-uhs], adjective: Not having money; habitually without money; poor. indigence [IN-dih-juhn(t)s], noun: A state of extreme poverty or destitution. Ex. The lean and hungry, unkempt, and addled look I'd cultivated throughout my twenties was beginning to read like desperation and indigence as I stepped into my mid-thirties. --Stephen McCauley, _The Man of the House_ Syn.: destitution, penury, poverty, want. ragamuffin (noun) A shabbily clothed, dirty child. Synonyms: tatterdemalion squalid (adj.) Dirty and wretched, as from poverty or lack of care. Synonyms: flyblown, sordid tatterdemalion [tat-uhr-dih-MAYL-yuhn; -MAY-lee-uhn], noun: A person dressed in tattered or ragged clothing; a ragamuffin. adjective: Tattered; ragged. Ex: To my ear, though, the prose has the tatterdemalion feel of something hooked together by commas, tacked together by periods. --Brad Leithauser,"Capturer of Hearts," _New York Times_ [7 April 1996] vagrant (noun) Homeless wanderer: a wanderer who has no permanent place to live. end page | PACIFISM & PAIN | PAINTING - PARENTING | PARIS - PASSPORTS | PAST (THE) - PATRIOTISM | PEACE - PERCENTAGES | PEOPLE | PERCEPTIONS - PERSUASION | PESSIMISM - PHOBIAS | PHONIES - PHYSICS | PI - PLANS | PLACES | PLANTS - POETRY | POETS - POLITICAL PARTIES | POLITICS & POLITICIANS | POLLS - POPES | POPEYE - POTENTIAL | POVERTY | POWER | PRACTICALITY - PRAYER | PREACHERS - PREPARED (BE) | PRESENT (THE) - PRETENDING | PRETENTIONS - PRIVACY | PROBLEMS - PROGRESSIVES | PROGRESS - PROPAGANDA | PROPOSALS - PUBLIC (THE) | PUBLIC OPINION - PURPOSE (ON HAVING A) | QUALITIES - QUIPS | QUIRKS - QUOTATIONS | | H | I - J | K - L | M | N - O | P - Q | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The End | The Reviews | Photos | |
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