c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
— Theodore Roethke
And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into recesses if his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe in one unceasing radiation of gloom.
— Edgar Allan Poe
Did you know that darkness has a taste, Grandma?
— Jo Nesbø, The Snowman
But death is stronger than that and when you cover your eyes you are the one who can't see the dark. The dark still sees you.
— Francesca Lia Block, The Elementals
The darkness that surrounds us cannot hurt us. It is the darkness in your own heart you should fear.
— Silvertris
You know, darkness is a funny thing. Little by little, it creeps up on you and before you know it, you can’t escape it
— Mackie Burt, Above
...then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Midnight"The hours glide Like drops of water on a window pane Midnight silence Fear unrolls in the air And the wind hides at the bottom of the well OH It's a leaf We think the earth is going to end Time stirs in the shadow Everyone is asleep A SIGH Inside the house someone has just died
— Vicente Huidobro, The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology
Silence is one of many forms of prayer.
— Y.I. Lee, Through a Glass
There was nothing the matter out there. It was in here, with me.I decided I'd better go to work, maybe that would exorcise me. I fled from the room almost as though it were haunted. It was too late to stop off at a breakfast counter now. I didn't want any, anyway. My stomach kept giving little quivers. In the end I didn't go to work, either. I couldn't, I wouldn't have been any good. I telephoned in that I was too ill to come, and it was no idle excuse, even though I was upright on my two legs.I roamed around the rest of the day in the sunshine. Wherever the sunshine was the brightest, I sought and stayed in that place, and when it moved on I moved with it. I couldn't get it bright enough or strong enough. I avoided the shade, I edged away from it, even the slight shade of an awning or of a tree.And yet the sunshine didn't warm me. Where others mopped their brows and moved out of it, I stayed - and remained cold inside. And the shade was winning the battle as the hours lengthened. It outlasted the sun. The sun weakened and died; the shade deepened and spread. Night was coming on, the time of dreams, the enemy. ("Nightmare")
— Cornell Woolrich, Baker's Dozen: 13 Short Mystery Novels
...cities are murky places - hatching grounds for monsters...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Armon stared into the wild darkness of his opponent and saw a reflection of his own fall.
— Wayne Gerard Trotman, Veterans of the Psychic Wars
To be of the Earth is to know the restlessness of being a seed the darkness of being planted the struggle toward the light the pain of growth into the light the joy of bursting and bearing fruit the love of being food for someone the scattering of your seeds the decay of the seasons the mystery of death and the miracle of birth.
— John Soos
The darkness always lies.
— Anthony Liccione
No my friend, darkness is not everywhere, for here and there I find faces illuminated from within; paper lanterns among the dark trees.
— Carole Borges
If you say I hide things because I'm shy, that can't be right. I've finally realized it's for a different reason-- that I don't want to see the darkness that lies in my heart
— Natsuo Kirino, Real World
Darkness is a defining characteristic of Rotters. But it’s worthy to remember that darkness is just that—it’s dark—and what is being concealed in the dark is not just the horrible and fearsome, it’s also the inspirational and moving. Horror means nothing without happiness; dark means nothing without light. Rotters may make you feel scared, but hopefully it will also make you simply feel. It’s that kind of book, or at least I hope it is.
— Daniel Kraus, Rotters
But I know too that if we ever make a world without shadow, if the chemists and scientists and psychologists succeed in abolishing fear, pain, loneliness, death, some of us will find life so intolerable we will probably blow out our brains out of sheer boredom.
— MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap
I was girly and friendly and my family life was happy but many days I felt like I was on the inside what Chase was on the outside. I always believed I was a happy person with a sad soul. I felt like I had had tragedy in my life when I hadn’t. Somehow, without having experienced what he had, his scars resonated with me.
— Kimberly Novosel, Loved
... only darkened trails of rain could paint your face upon a pane...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Why people wanted to dance whenever it got dark was beyond him. Somehow, the two seemed to go together, like bees and flowers, or flies and dung. Darkness and dancing.
— Terry Goodkind, Blood of the Fold
...you can have a dark heart and be a writer, but you can't have a black one..
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Your diet must be about fifty-fifty, carrots and locoweed," Annie said softly.He froze."I can't figure out what in the name of God's labia majora you think you're doing...but I'm impressed by how well you're doing it in the dark. You must have eyes like a cat.
— Spider Robinson, The Free Lunch
Death is a dark flower, its perfume heady and dangerous as it pulls you into its bosom.
— Carol Weekes, Dead Reflections
I reached for her through the darkness, but she was gone. Like dominoes folding over, the rest of the mirrors collapsed down on top of me. The impact caused the world around me to vanish.
— Ada Adams, ReAwakened
...Sunday evenings are heavier than clouds with rain, darker too and often interminable...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
As Sandy and his wife warmed to the tale, one tripping up another in their eagerness to tell everything, it gradually developed as distinct a superstition as I ever heard, and not without poetry and pathos. How long it was since the voice had been heard first, nobody could tell with certainty. Jarvis's opinion was that his father, who had been coachman at Brentwood before him, had never heard anything about it, and that the whole thing had arisen within the last ten years, since the complete dismantling of the old house: which was a wonderfully modern date for a tale so well authenticated. According to these witnesses, and to several whom I questioned afterwards, and who were all in perfect agreement, it was only in the months of November and December that "the visitation" occurred. During these months, the darkest of the year, scarcely a night passed without the recurrence of these inexplicable cries. Nothing, it was said, had ever been seen - at least nothing that could be identified. Some people, bolder or more imaginative than the others, had seen the darkness moving, Mrs Jarvis said with unconscious poetry. ("The Open Door")
— Mrs. Oliphant, The Gentlewomen of Evil: An Anthology of Rare Supernatural Stories from the Pens of Victorian Ladies
But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
There's darkness everywhere. You just can't see it because the sun is such an attention-whore.
— Jason Gann
It’s so dark - as if all the lights are just there to make the other places seem darker.
— Margaret Mahy, The Wilful Eye
Tom's whole being applauded this idea. It was deep, and dark, and awful; the hour, the circumstances, the surroundings, were in keeping with it.
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.
— Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
There is no Them. There are only facets of Us.
— John Green
We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.
— Immanuel Kant
If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
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.
— Mother Teresa
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
I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.
— Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.
— Coco Chanel
Poverty is the worst form of violence.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Close your eyes, Maxon."What?""Close your eyes.Somewhere in this palace, there is a woman who will be your wife. This girl? imagine that she depends on you. She needs you to cherish her and make her feel like the Selection didn't even happen. Like if you were dropped in your own out in the middle of the country to wander around door to door, she's still the one you would have found. She was always the one you would have picked. She needs you to provide for her and protect her. And if it came to a point where there was absolutely nothing to eat, and you couldn't even fall asleep at night because the sound of her stomach growling kept you awake—""Stop it!""Sorry.""Is that really what it's like? Out there... does that happen? Are people hungry like that a lot?""Maxon, I...""Tell me the truth.""Yes. That happens. I know of families where people give up their share for their children or siblings. I know of a boy who was whipped in the town square for stealing food. Sometimes you do crazy things when you are desperate.""A boy? How old?""Nine.""Have you ever been like that? Starving?...How bad?""Maxon, it will only upset you more.""Probably, but I'm only starting to realize how much I don't know about my own country. Please.""We've been pretty bad. Most time if it gets to where we have to choose, we keep the food and lose electricity. The worst was when it happened near Christmas one year. May didn't understand why we couldn't exchange gifts. As a general rule, there are never any leftovers at my house. Someone always wants more. I know the checks we've gotten over the last few weeks have really helped, and my family is really smart about money. I'm sure they have already tucked it away so it will stretch out for a long time. You've done so much for us, Maxon.""Good God. When you said that you were only here for the food, you weren't kidding, were you?""Really, Maxon, we've been doing pretty well lately. I—""I'll see you at dinner.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.
— Plutarch
True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the "rejects of life," to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands--whether of individuals or entire peoples--need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.
— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
American humorist Kin Hubbard said , "It ain't no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be". The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?" Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue... Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
The United States spends over $87 billion conducting a war in Iraq while the United Nations estimates that for less than half that amount we could provide clean water, adequate diets, sanitations services and basic education to every person on the planet. And we wonder why terrorists attack us.
— John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
People.. were poor not because they were stupid or lazy. They worked all day long, doing complex physical tasks. They were poor because the financial institution in the country did not help them widen their economic base.
— Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
If you go out into the real world, you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate but because they cannot retain the returns of their labor. They have no control over capital, and it is the ability to control capital that gives people the power to rise out of poverty.
— Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
The tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self denial.
— Oscar Wilde
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 as beggar is a reminder of nothing.
— John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous
And St. Francis added: "My dear and beloved Brother, the treasure of blessed poverty is so very precious and divine that we are not worthy to possess it in our vile bodies. For poverty is that heavenly virtue by which all earthy and transitory things are trodden under foot, and by which every obstacle is removed from the soul so that it may freely enter into union with the eternal Lord God. It is also the virtue which makes the soul, while still here on earth, converse with the angels in Heaven. It is she who accompanied Christ on the Cross, was buried with Christ in the Tomb, and with Christ was raised and ascended into Heaven, for even in this life she gives to souls who love her the ability to fly to Heaven, and she alone guards the armor of true humility and charity.
— Francis of Assisi, The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi
There is often talk of human rights, but it is also necessary to talk of the rights of humanity. Why should some people walk barefoot, so that others can travel in luxurious cars? Why should some live for thirty-five years, so that others can live for seventy years? Why should some be miserably poor, so that others can be hugely rich? I speak on behalf of the children in the world who do not have a piece of bread. I speak on the behalf of the sick who have no medicine, of those whose rights to life and human dignity have been denied.
— Fidel Castro
People in third world countries aren't living in poverty, they're living pretty much as nature intended us to live it and putting us all to shame
— James Perrin, The Occasional Swearing Of Politician Perrin
When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences.
— Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
And that’s when things get messy. When people begin moving beyond charity and toward justice and solidarity with the poor and oppressed, as Jesus did, they get in trouble. Once we are actually friends with the folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity. One of my friends has a shirt marked with the words of late Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara: “When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me a communist.” Charity wins awards and applause but joining the poor gets you killed. People do not get crucified for living out of love that disrupts the social order that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them.
— Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical
People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man like Paddy, with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such nonsense to pretend that those who have 'come down in the world' are to be pitied above all others.The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start,and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.
— George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.
— Jane Jacobs
We're not stupid! We're just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinction
— Orhan Pamuk, Snow
Society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy
—  those who had anything united in common terror.
We must powder our wigs
—  that is why so many poor people have no bread.
It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
The fact that the poor are alive is clear proof of their ability.
— Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
Even today we don't pay serious attention to the issue of poverty, because the powerful remain relatively untouched by it. Most people distance themselves from the issue by saying that if the poor worked harder, they wouldn't be poor.
— Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.
— Hunter S. Thompson
But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution.
— Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
Royce Westmoreland stared at him with biting scorn. "I despise hypocrisy, particularly when it is coated with holiness.""May I ask for a specific example?""Fat priests," Royce replied, "with fat purses, who lecture staving peasants on the dangers of gluttony and the merits of poverty.
— Judith McNaught, A Kingdom of Dreams
Poverty does not belong in civilized human society. Its proper place is in a museum. That's where it will be.
— Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.
— Ray Bradbury, The Golden Apples of the Sun
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.... It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks.This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Bluebeard
You can't eat straight A's.
— Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
When a destitute mother starts earning an income, her dreams of success invariably center around her children. A woman's second priority is the household. She wants to buy utensils, build a stronger roof, or find a bed for herself and her family. A man has an entirely different set of priorities. When a destitute father earns extra income, he focuses more attention on himself. Thus money entering a household through a woman brings more benefits to the family as a whole.
— Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
As usual, in every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.
— Vandana Shiva
Where you live should not determine whether you live, or whether you die.
— Bono
People who don't have much get ugly about giving up the little they have left.
— Andrew Vachss
.. becoming attached to a country involves pressing, uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens.
— Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
In places where government priorities and market imperatives create a world so capricious that to help a neighbor is to risk your ability to feed your family, and sometimes even your own liberty, the idea of the mutually supportive poor community is demolished. The poor blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who are not poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly.
— Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
When I get down to my last dime I'll just walk over to skid row.""There are some real weirdos down there.""They're everywhere.
— Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
What I did not know yet about hunger, but would find out over the next twenty-one years, was that brilliant theorists of economics do not find it worthwhile to spend time discussing issues of poverty and hunger. They believe that these will be resolved when general economic prosperity increases. These economists spend all their talents detailing the process of development and prosperity, but rarely reflect on the origin and development of poverty and hunger. A a result, poverty continues.
— Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
In war," answered the weaver, "the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free.
— Oscar Wilde, The Young King & The Remarkable Rocket
If Hemingway is to believed, poverty is an invaluable school for a writer. Poverty makes a man clear-sighted. And so on. It's interesting that Hemingway realized this only when he became rich.
— Sergei Dovlatov, The Suitcase
A commission of haberdashers could alone have reported whatthe rest of her poor dress was made of, but it had a strong generalresemblance to seaweed, with here and there a gigantic tea-leaf.Her shawl looked particularly like a tea-leaf after long infusion.
— Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit
Some of the best people that ever lived have been as destitute as I am; and if you are a Christian, you ought not to consider poverty a crime.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness. 
— Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
They [Harvard academia] liked the poor, but didn't like the smell of the poor.
— Chris Hedges
Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.
— Richard Wright, Black Boy
Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.
— George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
[There] are people who make a complete and utter mockery of 'democracy' and 'equality' - they're the casualties of the primitive rules of competition which run our society, and the welfare state just keeps them alive. That's all.
— Michael Palin, Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years
If you can't afford the good food or if you can't afford health care or if you don't have a job or if your car is dangerous because you can't get it fixed and you DIE, you just lost the game-bzzzzz-thanks for playing extreme capitalism.
— Marc Maron, Attempting Normal
Th direct elimination of elimination of poverty should be the objective of all development aid. Development should be viewed as a human rights issue, not as a question of simply increasing the gross national product (GNP).
— Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I believe that the emphasis on curbing population growth diverts attention from the more vital issue of pursuing policies that allow the population to take care of itself.
— Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
How often do the poor daydream of a better life? Plenty, no doubt, and where does it get them? It is the poor who begin with a daydream and realize at some point that they have to get up, roll their sleeves, and start doing something about those day dreams who succeed. And there are many who have.
— Stephen Richards
Suffering is a cutting edge political design.
— Bruno De Oliveira, Constructed To Rot: A Critical Reflection On Homelessness
Childhood, after all, is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child.
— Anthony Horowitz, The House of Silk
It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.
— George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said. "There is noth-ing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes tocondemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!
— Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
The real cause of hunger is the powerlessness of the poor to gain access to the resources they need to feed themselves.
— Frances Moore Lappé
Rebels usually have something to complain about, and if they don't they make it up. All too often the really disadvantaged are in no position to rebel; they just suffer quietly.
— Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
Furnishing was not a priority in the Citadel. Shelves, stools, tables... There was a rumor among the novices that priests towards the top of the hierarchy had golden furniture, but there was no sign of it here. The room was as severe as anything in the novices' quarters although it had, perhaps, a more opulent severity; it wasn't the forced bareness of poverty, but the starkness of intent.
— Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
Poverty is not a circumstance, it's an attitude.
— Rita Gonzalez
Poor is the man whom is not content with what he has.
— Rita Gonzalez
The poor love life as passionately as the rich do. Perhaps more, for the effort it takes to cling to it.
— Joan Thomas, Curiosity
This time of year," she said, "people’s consciences gnaw at them. They give away truckloads of canned goods and quote Dickens and wring their hands over the ‘less fortunate.’" We boarded the Metro and took seats perpendicular to each other. "But God forbid anyone should address why they’re poor in the first place, or try to change the structures that keep them poor. Then the ‘less fortunate’ turn into ‘welfare queens’ and ‘derelicts.’ But if I were a lobbyist whoring on behalf of some transnational corporation, I’d never hear the word ‘derelict.’""So when it comes to taking care of poor people," I said, "if Mother Teresa is the Hallmark card, then you’re the electric bill.
— Jeri Smith-Ready, Requiem for the Devil
When giving money to the amputated, you must put it directly into their pockets.
— Greg Campbell, Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World's Most Precious Stones
Let these men sing out their songs,they've been walking all day long,all their fortune's spent and gone...silver dollar in the subway station;quarters for the papers for the jobs.
— Roman Payne
Like navigation markings in unknown waters, definitions of poverty need to be distinctive and unambiguous. A definition that is not precise is as bad as no definition at all.
— Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
I decided I would go with them, but it would be at my father's house that I would eat. I would share his food, and his poverty.
— Phoolan Devi, The Bandit Queen of India: An Indian Woman's Amazing Journey from Peasant to International Legend
The surest way to remain poor is to be honest.
— Napoléon Bonaparte
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty?
— George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her—her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that ‘It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,’ and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her—understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.
— George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
I thought it very touching to see these two women, coarse and shabby and beaten, so united; to see what they could be to one another; to see how they felt for one another, how the heart of each to each was softened by the hard trials of their lives. I think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us. What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and God.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Without an informed electorate, politicians will continue to use the bottom billion merely for photo opportunities, rather than promoting real transformation.
— Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity and to walk toward a civilization which will be free and intelligent; which will be healthy and unafraid, and build in the world a culture led by black folk and joined by peoples of all colors and all races - without poverty, ignorance and disease!
— W.E.B. Du Bois, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader
And every historic effort to forge a democratic project has been undermined by two fundamental realities: poverty and paranoia. The persistence of poverty generates levels of despair that deepen social conflict the escalation of paranoia produces levels of distrust that reinforce cultural division. Rae is the most explosive issue in American life precisely because it forces us to confront the tragic facts of poverty and paranoia despair, and distrust. In short, a candid examination of race matters takes us to the core of the crisis of American democracy (p. 107).
— Cornel West, Race Matters
the larger the percentage of the national income taken by taxes the greater the deterrent to private production and employment. When the total tax burden grows beyond a bearable size, the problem of devising taxes that will not discourage and disrupt production becomes insoluble.
— Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest & Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics
In the past 20 years alone, it adds up to more death than were caused by all the civil and international wars adn government repression of the entire twentieth century, the century of Hitler and Stalin. How much would we give to prevent those horrors? Yet how little are we doing to prevent today's even larger toll and all the misery that it involves? I believe that if you read this book to the end, and look honestly and carefully at our situation, assessing both the facts and the ethical arguments, you will agree that we must act.
— Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
I’ve always felt that your belongings have never been on a level with you.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
A Man's management of his own purse speaks volumes about character
— Thomas Jefferson
According to the 2003 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, 25.8 percent of [New Orleans] population lives below the poverty line... This is more than twice the national average, but is close tot he percentages in other American cities such as Miami (28.5), Los Angeles (22.1), Atlanta (24.4), and New York City (21.2). 
— Billy Sothern, Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City
She missed -- without knowing what she missed-- paints and crayons
— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
A man will seek to express his relation to the stars; but when a man's consciousness has been riveted upon obtaining a loaf of bread, that loaf of bread is as important as the stars.
— Richard Wright, Black Boy
For avarice begins where poverty ends.
— Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions
Mere inflation-that is, the mere issuance of more money, with the consequence of higher wages and prices-may look like the creation of more demand. But in terms of the actual production and exchange of real things it is not.
— Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest & Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics
When Americans find out I grew up in the tenements, the question they invariably ask me is “how did you end up there?” Americans, it seems, find comfort in reasons and explanations. They honestly believe that if they can find the reason for someone else’s misfortune, they can avoid that misfortune themselves. If they could find out how I ended up in the tenements, they could assure themselves that it could never have happened to them.
— Susan Lynn Peterson, Clare
I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.
— Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
A castaway in the sea was going down for the third time when he caught sight of a passing ship. Gathering his last strength, he waved frantically and called for help. Someone on board peered at him scornfully and shouted back, "Get a boat!
— Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure
The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor
— Herman Melville
For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying 'lepers' we would understand 'outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.' But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign.
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Poverty always looks the same, no matter where you come across it. The rich can always express their opulence by varying their lives. Different houses, clothes, cars. Or thoughts, dreams. But for the poor there is nothing but compulsory grayness, the only form of expression available to poverty.
— Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing
The food we were given was no more than eatable, but the patron was not mean about drink; he allowed us two litres of wine a day each, knowing that if a plongeur is not given two litres he will steal three.
— George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
If the apostles reminded even Paul himself to remember the poor (Galatians 2:10), then surely the rest of us need such a reminder.
— Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches
it seemed that the pain of their physical illness at times was less than the misery of their poverty ridden existence, the unending wait in the queues and the feeling of hopelessness and abandonment by your own system was enough to rob them of their will power to fight any disease.
— Madhu Vajpayee, Seeking Redemption
In rural and struggling Lexington, Virginia, Lee's new postwar home, one writer joked darkly dollars were so scarce that they had to be introduced to one another when they met on Main Street.
— Charles Bracelen Flood, Lee The Last Years
There was a problem: No one cared about human rights anymore, not at home or abroad. They cared about growth--hoped for and celebrated in all the newspapers, invoked by zealous bureaucrats in every self-serving television interview. On this matter, the filmmaker was agnostic--he came from money, and couldn't see the urgency. Like many of his ilk, he sometimes confused poverty (which must be eradicated!) with folklore (which must be preserved!), but it was a genuine confusion, without a hint of ill intention, which only made it more infuriating.
— Daniel Alarcón, At Night We Walk in Circles
As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
— Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
You say you care about the poor? Tell me their names.
— Craig Greenfield
Such a little childTo send to be a priestling...Icy poverty
— Shiki, Japanese Haiku
Remember, aid cannot achieve the end of poverty. Only homegrown development base on the dynamism of individuals and firms in free markets can do that.
— William Easterly, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
Poverty is what you see in the eyes of a Black child living in the squatter camp.Matsime Simon Mohapi
— Matsime Simon Mohapi, Poverty in the Land of Riches - South Africa
Back in Russia we were dirt-poor. Here in the West we are still poor but have risen above the dirt to tower alongside stalks of grass!
— Vera Nazarian
By defining the problem as "hunger," the emergency food system is helping to direct our attention away from the more fundamental problem of poverty, and the even more basic problem of inequality.
— Janet Poppendieck, Sweet Charity?: Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement
Not all developing countries are the same.
— Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
Recent evidence confirms that retail prices of essential consumer goods in poor countries are not appreciably lower than in the United States or Western Europe. In fact, with deregulation and "free trade", the cost of living in many Third World cities is now higher than in the United States. My experience in Latin America and Haiti is that the prices of meat, fish and fresh vegetables are about the same as in the United States. Can you imagine eating on less than one dollar a day?
— Vincent A. Gallagher, The True Cost of Low Prices: The Violence of Globalization
Poverty is a dish best served with Potato Soup.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
Poverty is not intrinsically a trap, otherwise we would all still be poor.
— Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
Tipsy, they tumbled early into bed - to get as much sleep as they could. So they would feel less hunger. The summer catch had been poor; there wasn't much food. They ate with care and looked sideways at the old: the old were gluttons, everybody knew it, and what was the good of feeding them? It wouldn't harm them to starve a little. 	The hungry dogs howled. The women rinsed the children's bellies with hot water three times a day, so they wouldn't cry so much for food. The old starved silently. ("The North")
— Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Dragon: Fifteen Stories
What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him $2 an hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?
— Paul A. Samuelson, Economics
So I say a name, even if self-bestowed, is better than a number. In the register of the potter's field I shall soon have both. What wealth!
— Ambrose Bierce, The Moonlit Road and Other Ghost and Horror Stories
This is the basis for the most important critique of microfinance. The poor are not entrepreneurs. The idea that more than a few will turn tiny loans into a viable business is simply unrealistic.
— Ian Smillie, Freedom from Want: The Remarkable Success Story of BRAC, the Global Grassroots Organization That's Winning the Fight Against Poverty
Sometimes being poor means having to choose between your principles and your survival.
— Paula Stokes, Hidden Pieces
And you spend your day going around from the house of the washerman to the house of the sweeper, asking about this one's son and that one's nephew, but spending no time with your own family. It is no secret that many people here think that you are a communist.'Rasheed reflected that this probably meant only that he loathed the poverty and injustice endemic to the village, and that he made no particular secret of it.
— Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
It’s not right that some people have so much and others have so little.
— Paula Stokes, Hidden Pieces
Poverty without a people's government looks like hopelessness, but to see poverty in organized communities is to see relief-in-progress.
— Holly Near, Fire in the Rain...Singer in the Storm: An Autobiography
Those who would give us equal opportunity for everybody are threatened by it. They are afraid to lose their privileged positions. They pay lip service to it, they act by half measures and do everything to violate the laws they have themselves instituted to make sure the high class is always high. It never changes, it always goes in a circle, when the oppressed fight and get to the top, and they become the new elite and forget the promises.
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Book of Wisdom
The poor eats with his eyes, the rich with his mouth.
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Book of Wisdom
When everyone is poor you don't know you're poor. My father worked so some of the boys thought I was actually rich.
— Stan Grant
The tricky thing about the hood is that you’re always working, working, working, and you feel like something’s happening, but really nothing’s happening at all.
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
The world has been taught to be scared of him, but the reality is that he is scared of the world because he has none of the tools necessary to cope with it.
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
...[A] lot of them, without even understanding the cause, just give up. They take what they can-mostly in pleasure,and they make the grand gesture, the wild gesture, because what have they got to lose if they do die in a car wreck or a knife fight or something else equally stupid.
— John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me
The master doesn’t need to chain his slaves; their needs will chain them to him. You can end slavery by the stroke of a pen, but the pressing call of necessity will reestablish it.
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Book of Wisdom
Slaves in the past were captured by force
—  today’s slaves surrender themselves. The masters are the same old folk (who are now more civilized) who would not lift a hand against a fellow human being! They have established economic systems that perpetuate their superiority so the poor are blamed either for their laziness or their fate.
Free yourself from mental slavery. Break those invisible chains your masters put on your spiritual neck to control you
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Book of Wisdom