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Rich and poor
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Published Friday, December 12, 2014 @ 9:18 PM EST
Dec 12 2014

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.
-Samuel Johnson

A poor, charitable person can sometimes feel rich, a miserly Croesus never.
-Marie Ebner von Ebner-Eschenbach

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
-James Baldwin

By and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them.
-Will Durant

By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men.
-G.K. Chesterton

Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money.
-George Carlin

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is poverty. What is matter with the rich is uselessness.
-George Bernard Shaw

Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich, something for nothing.
-George Bernard Shaw

He who covets is always poor.
-Claudian

History will judge societies and governments- and their institutions- not by how big they are or how well they serve the rich and the powerful, but by how effectively they respond to the needs of the poor and the helpless.
-Cesar Chavez

Hope is the poor man's bread.
-George Herbert

I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy. I was deprived. (Oh not deprived but rather underprivileged) Then they told me that underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary.
-Jules Feiffer

I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.
-Thomas Babington Macaulay

I'd like to live like a poor man with lots of money.
-Pablo Picasso

I've been rich and I've been poor... Believe me, rich is better.
-Mae West

If a nation cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
-John F. Kennedy

If poor you are, poor you will always be,
For wealth's now given to none but to the rich.
-Martial

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.
-Stephen Colbert

If you are rich, you have to be an idiot not to stay rich. And if you are poor, you have to be really smart to get rich.
-John Green

If you have two jobs and you're rich, you have diversified interests. If you have two jobs and you're poor, you're moonlighting.
-Unattributed

If your name is on the building, you're rich. If your name is on your desk, you're middle class. If your name is on your shirt, you're poor.
-Rich Hall

In America, even a poor boy can grow up to win the support of powerful special interest groups.
-John Callahan

It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.
-Anton Chekhov

It is said that the children of the very poor are not brought up, but dragged up.
-Charles Dickens

It's no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.
-Frank McKinney (Kin) Hubbard

Money is a poor man's credit card.
-Marshall McLuhan

Never in the history of the world have so many people been so rich; never in the history off the world have so many of those same people felt themselves so poor.
-Lewis H. Lapham

No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.
-Gabriel Garcia Márquez

Of course there's a different law for the rich and poor; Otherwise who would go into business?
-E. Ralph Stewart

Plenty has made me poor.
-Ovid

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.
-Oscar Ameringer

Poor is a state of mind you never grow out of, but being broke is just a temporary condition.
-Dick Gregory

Poor men want meat for their stomachs, rich men want stomachs for their meat.
-Anthony Copley

Poor people have access to the courts in the same manner that the Christians had access to the lions.
-Judge Earl Johnson, Jr.

Poor people have more fun than rich people, they say; and I notice it's the rich people who keep saying it.
-Jack Paar

Poor people know poor people, and rich people know rich people. It is one of the few things La Rochefoucauld did not say, but then La Rochefoucauld never lived in the Bronx.
-Moss Hart

Rich people pay Fox people to make middle-class people blame poor people.
-John Fugelsang

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony.
-Jane Austen

Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.
-Peter Ustinov

The bonus is really one of the great give-aways in business enterprise. It is the annual salve applied to the conscience of the rich and the wounds of the poor.
-E.B. White

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations... But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

The contented person is never poor-the discontented is never rich. The quantum of wantum remains constant.
-Samuel Beckett

The difference between our rich and poor grows greater every year. Our distribution of wealth is getting more uneven all the time. A man can make a million and he is on every page in the morning. But it never tells you who gave up that million he got. You can't get money without taking it from somebody.
-Will Rogers

The fellow that has no money is poor. The fellow that has nothing but money is poorer still.
-Billy Sunday

The genius of capitalism consists precisely in its lack of morality. Unless he is rich enough to hire his own choir, a capitalist is a fellow who, by definition, can ill afford to believe in anything other than the doctrine of the bottom line. Deprive a capitalist of his God-given right to lie and cheat and steal, and the poor sap stands a better than even chance of becoming one of the abominable wards of the state from whose grimy fingers the Reagan Administration hopes to snatch the ark of democracy.
-Lewis H. Lapham

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.
-G.K. Chesterton

The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
-Anatole France

The man who has his millions will want everything he can lay his hands on and then raise his voice against the poor devil who wants ten cents more a day.
-Samuel Gompers

The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover didn't know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow's hands.
-Will Rogers

The observances of the church concerning feasts and fasts are tolerably well-kept, since the rich keep the feasts and the poor keep the fasts.
-Sydney Smith

The petty economies of the rich are just as amazing as the silly extravagances of the poor.
-William Feather

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
-G.K. Chesterton

The poor have the same basic pleasures as the rich, and the rich will always resent it.
-Mignon McLaughlin

The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.
-Andrew Carnegie

The rich rob the poor and the poor rob one another.
-Sojourner Truth

The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.
-Willem de Kooning

The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it.
-Edward Dowling

The world has grown rich and refined, but chiefly by the efforts of those who themselves continue poor and ignorant.
-Theodore Parker

There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.
-Jean-Paul Sartre

There is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

There is nothing that keeps poor people poor as much as paying doctor bills.
-Will Rogers

There is one rule that works in every calamity. Be it pestilence, war, or famine, the rich get richer and poor get poorer. The poor even help arrange it.
-Will Rogers

Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know that it is money.
-Gerald Brenan

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
-W.E.B. DuBois

We have two American flags always; one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it, it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it, it means danger, revolution, anarchy.
-Henry Miller

We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.
-Bill Gates

We might be on the brink of an apocalypse if, instead of poor people with suicide bombs killing middle class people, middle-class people with suicide bombs started killing rich guys.
-Bruce Sterling

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.
-Lionel Trilling

What does peace mean to the poor who are being actively robbed of their resources and for whom everyday life is a grim battle for water, shelter, survival and, above all, some semblance of dignity? For them, peace is war.
-Arundhati Roy

What we have in this country is socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.
-Gore Vidal

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.
-Helder Camara

When the rich make war it's the poor that die.
-Jean-Paul Sartre

Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.
-John Ruskin

You can't do much for the poor, as they are not in with the right people.
-Will Cuppy

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

You've got to pity the poor Democrats in Congress. Most of them are on record against capital punishment, since they naturally don't want to diminish their constituent base.
-Wes Pruden


Categories: Income inequality, Quotes on a topic


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