“As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid.” ~ Oscar Wilde
“Debt is the worst poverty.” ~ Thomas Fuller
“Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that.” ~ Norman Vincent Peale
“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 thoughts. ” ~ Henry David Thoreau
“It’s hard to do it because you have got to look people in the eye and tell them they’re irresponsible and lazy. And who’s going to want to do that? Because that’s what poverty is, ladies and gentlemen. In this country (USA), you can succeed if you get educated and work hard. Period.” ~ Bill O’Reilly
“Learn to be pleased with everything; with wealth, so far as it makes us beneficial to others; with poverty, for not having much to care for, and with obscurity, for being unenvied.” ~ Plutarch
“Money is humankind’s greatest invention. Money doesn’t discriminate. Money doesn’t care whether a person is poor, whether a person comes from a good family, or what his skin color is. Anybody can make money.” ~ Takafumi Horie
“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
“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied…but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.” ~John Berger
“The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations.” ~ Adam Smith
“Thousands upon thousands are yearly brought into a state of real poverty by their great anxiety not to be thought poor.” ~ William Cobbett
“You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money.” ~ P.J. O’Rourke
“You don’t seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help.” ~ Jean Kerr
