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.

He that has pity on the poor lends to the Lord.

Remember the poor, it costs nothing.

The surest way to remain poor is to be an honest man.

When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist.

The hermit doesn't sleep at night, in love with the blue of the vacant moon. The cool of the breeze that rustles the trees rustles him too.

I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

I want there to be no peasant in my kingdom so poor that he cannot have a chicken in his pot every Sunday.

We have not yet reached the goal but.. we shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty shall be banished from this nation.

It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.

Here we all live in a state of ambitious poverty.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

I wasn't born in a log cabin, but my family moved into one as soon as they could afford it.

Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.

He who knows how to be poor knows everything.

Poverty, of course, is no disgrace, but it is damned annoying.

Poverty is not a shame, but the being ashamed of it is.

A poor man is all schemes.

The poorest He that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest He.

There is a noble manner of being poor, and who does not know it will never be rich.

The seven deadly sins... food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.

Virtue often trips and falls over the sharp edge of poverty.

No one is poor who does not think they are, however, if in prosperity with impatience they desire more, and proclaim their wants they disclose their beggarly condition.

I've never been poor, only broke. Being poor is a frame of mind. Being broke is only a temporary situation

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.

I am my brother's keeper, and he's sleeping pretty rough these days.