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Poverty Quotes

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Poverty Quotes

“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.”

“[The right] may never bring prayer back to schools, but it has rescued all manner of rightwing economic nostrums from history's dustbins. Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson's estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt's anti-trust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century.”

“Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals. We look away from government for relief, because we know that force (legalized) invades the personal liberty of man, seizes upon the natural elements and intervenes between man and natural laws; from this exercise of force through governments flows nearly all the misery, poverty, crime and confusion existing in society.”

“What makes the Southern Poverty Law Center particularly odious is its habit of taking legitimate conservatives and jumbling them with genuine hate groups (the Klan, Aryan Nation, skinheads, etc.), to make it appear that there's a logical relationship between say opposing affirmative action and lynching, or demands for an end to government services for illegal aliens and attacks on dark-skinned immigrants. The late novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand called this 'the broad-brush smear.'”

“Money never made any man rich, but his mind. He that can order himself to the law of nature, is not only without the sense, but the fear of poverty.”

Men Mind Made Law Order Poverty Rich Laws Of Nature

Book:Delphi Complete Works of Ben Jonson (Illustrated)

Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ben Jonson (Illustrated)

“It's so hard for me to even acknowledge America without talking about race. If you look at our society, if you look at the prisons, if you look at the poverty and which side of the line the majority of people are, we have to acknowledge how we divide ourselves up, that there's racism alive in this country. And it's not in the law. It's in our minds. And that's what we have to actively battle.”

People Ifs Mind Looks Country Hard America Law Sides Lines Race Talking Poverty Alive Battle Racism Majority Prison Acknowledge Our Society Divides

Author:Dave Matthews

“It's come around to that point of view at the end of a long evolutionary process, in which the rule of law has slowly been replaced by giant idiosyncratic bureaucracies that are designed to criminalize failure, poverty, and weakness on the one hand, and to immunize strength, wealth, and success on the other.”

Long Ends Hands Law Process Wealth Views Poverty Weakness Point Of View Giants Replaced Bureaucracy Rule Of Law Wealth And Success

Book:The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

Source: The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

“Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production.”

May Reason Law Order Individual Social Wealth Poverty Becoming Increase Productions Miserable Capitalist Inexorable

Book:The Right to be Lazy and Other Studies

Source: The Right to be Lazy and Other Studies

“For what you call the Law is but a club of the rich over the lowest of men, sanctifying the conquest of the earth by a few and making their theft the way of things. But over and above these pitiful statutes of yours that enclose the common land and reduce us to poverty to make you fat stands the Law of Creation, which renders judgement on rich and poor alike, making them one. For freedom is the man who will thus turn the world upside down, therefore no wonder he has enemies”

“It was this desire for a feeling of importance that led an uneducated, poverty-stricken grocery clerk to study some law books he found in the bottom of a barrel of household plunder that he had bought for fifty cents. You have probably heard of this grocery clerk. His name was Lincoln.”

Book Feelings Law Desire Found Names Poverty Study Heard Importance Bottom Fifty Cents Household Groceries Barrels Clerks Uneducated Plunder Law Books

Book:How to win friends & influence people

Source: How to win friends & influence people

“Wealth makes the laws that poverty must obey.”

Law Wealth Poverty

Author:Mason Cooley

“Because my graduate academic training at law school was not one that included most of the intellectual traditions I find useful for understanding the conditions and problems that most concern me - anti-colonial theories, Foucault, critical disability studies, prison studies and the like are rarely seen in standard US Law School curricula, where students are still fighting on many campuses to get a single class on race or poverty offered - I developed most of my thinking about these topics through activist reading groups and collaborative writing projects with other activist scholars.”

“A single assembly will never be a steady guardian of the laws, if Machiavel is right, when he says, Men are never good but through necessity: on the contrary, when good and evil are left to their choice, they will not fail to throw every thing into disorder and confusion. Hunger and poverty may make men industrious, but laws only can make them good; for, if men were so of themselves, there would be no occasion for laws; but, as the case is far otherwise, they are absolutely necessary.”

Source: The Works of John Adams Vol. 4: Novanglus, Thoughts on Government, Defence of the Constitution I

“The death of American liberalism as a significant moral force can be traced to the point in when President Bill Clinton signed legislation that effectively ended the main federal anti-poverty program and turned the fate of welfare recipients, 70 percent of whom were children, over to the tender mercies of the states. With a stroke of the pen, Clinton eliminated what remained of New Deal-era compassion for the poor and codified into law the "tough love" callousness that his Republican allies in the Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, had long embraced.”

“Every day you make a choice either to sow some of your seed or to eat it. When you exercise faith and sow, you release God's law of prosperity. When you give in to your fear and eat your seed, or hide it, you release God's law of poverty.”

Giving Law Choices Poverty Exercise Prosperity Seeds Release

Author:John Avanzini

“You [Jill Stein] also believe in a full employment policy that was the majority Democratic Party policy in 1946. They actually passed a law to that effect. You want to end poverty and when people see how relatively easy it is to end poverty. And one way is to increase the minimum wage: catch up; it's been frozen for so many years.”

People Way Want Years Believe Ends Law Easy Party Poverty Effects Policy Increase Majority Democratic Employment One Way Minimum Frozen Democratic Party Minimum Wage Jill Stein

Author:Ralph Nader

“I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m proud of it.”

Believe Law Political I Believe Wealth Liberty Poverty Democracy Proud Limits Equal Institutions Extremes I Believe In Rule Of Law Civil Liberties Wealth And Poverty

Author:Paul Krugman