"There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
— Dwight D. Eisenhower

"There is no Them. There are only facets of Us."
— John Green

"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: A Novel)

"Poverty is the worst form of violence."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

"We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without."
— Immanuel Kant

"The tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self denial."
— Oscar Wilde

"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)

"Anywhere you have extreme poverty and no national health insurance, no promise of health care regardless of social standing, that's where you see the sharp limitations of market-based health care. "
— Paul Farmer

"Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it. (from "All Over But the Shoutin'")"
— Rick Bragg

"Although it is very easy to marry a wife, it is very difficult to support her along with the children and the household. Accordingly, no one notices this faith of Jacob. Indeed, many hate fertility in a wife for the sole reason that the offspring must be supported and brought up. For this is what they commonly say: ‘Why should I marry a wife when I am a pauper and a beggar? I would rather bear the burden of poverty alone and not load myself with misery and want.’ But this blame is unjustly fastened on marriage and fruitfulness. Indeed, you are indicting your unbelief by distrusting God’s goodness, and you are bringing greater misery upon yourself by disparaging God’s blessing. For if you had trust in God’s grace and promises, you would undoubtedly be supported. But because you do not hope in the Lord, you will never prosper."
— Martin Luther (Sermons of Martin Luther, The)

"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

"It is a common condition of being poor...you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them."
— Rick Bragg

""It is good," he thought "to taste for yourself everything you need to know. That worldly pleasures and wealth are not good things, I learned even as a child. I knew it for a long time, but only now have I experienced it. And now I know it, I know it not only because I remember hearing it, but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach. And it is good for me to know it!""
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

"Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime."
— Aristotle

"In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had- A Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up it's feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to
amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence."
— Eugene Debs

"Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room."
— Ray Bradbury (The Golden Apples of the Sun)

"For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if only for one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured--disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui--in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off."
— Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer)

"It won't be Christmas without presents."
— Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)

"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: A Record of Childhood and Youth)

"We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet."
— E.M. Forster

"..I began speaking.. First, I took issue with the media's characterization of the post-Katrina New Orleans as resembling the third world as its poor citizens clamored for a way out. I suggested that my experience in New Orleans working with the city's poorest people in the years before the storm had reflected the reality of third-world conditions in New Orleans, and that Katrina had not turned New Orleans into a third-world city but had only revealed it to the world as such. I explained that my work, running Reprieve, a charity that brought lawyers and volunteers to the Deep South from abroad to work on death penalty issues, had made it clear to me that much of the world had perceived this third-world reality, even if it was unnoticed by our own citizens.
To try answer Ryan's question, I attempted to use my own experience to explain that for many people in New Orleans, and in poor communities across the country, the government was merely an antagonist, a terrible landlord, a jailer, and a prosecutor. As a lawyer assigned to indigent people under sentence of death and paid with tax dollars, I explained the difficulty of working with clients who stand to be executed and who are provided my services by the state, not because they deserve them, but because the Constitution requires that certain appeals to be filed before these people can be killed. The state is providing my clients with my assistance, maybe the first real assistance they have ever received from the state, sot that the state can kill them.
I explained my view that the country had grown complacent before Hurricane Katrina, believing that the civil rights struggle had been fought and won, as though having a national holiday for Martin Luther King, or an annual march by politicians over the bridge in Selma, Alabama, or a prosecution - forty years too late - of Edgar Ray Killen for the murder of civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, were any more than gestures. Even though President Bush celebrates his birthday, wouldn't Dr. King cry if he could see how little things have changed since his death? If politicians or journalists went to Selma any other day of the year, they would see that it is a crumbling city suffering from all of the woes of the era before civil rights were won as well as new woes that have come about since. And does anyone really think that the Mississippi criminal justice system could possibly be a vessel of social change when it incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than almost any place in the world, other than Louisiana and Texas, and then compels these prisoners, most of whom are black, to work prison farms that their ancestors worked as chattel of other men?
...
I hoped, out loud, that the post-Katrina experience could be a similar moment [to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fiasco], in which the American people could act like the children in the story and declare that the emperor has no clothes, and hasn't for a long time. That, in light of Katrina, we could be visionary and bold about what people deserve. We could say straight out that there are people in this country who are racist, that minorities are still not getting a fair shake, and that Republican policies heartlessly disregard the needs of individual citizens and betray the common good. As I stood there, exhausted, in front of the thinning audience of New Yorkers, it seemed possible that New Orleans's destruction and the suffering of its citizens hadn't been in vain. "
— Billy Sothern (Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City)

"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)

"Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope."
— George Eliot (Daniel Deronda)

""They [Harvard academia] liked the poor, but didn't like the smell of the poor.""
— Chris Hedges

"The folly of men not their hard heartedness was the great cause of the world s poverty."
— Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward: 2000-1887)

"It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have
thought so much about poverty--it is the thing you have feared all your
life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it, is
all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite
simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be
terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar LOWNESS of
poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the
complicated meanness, the crust-wiping."
— George Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London)

"They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar"
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden & On the Duty of Civil Disobedience)

"The Civilized… murder their children by producing too many of them without being able to provide for their well-being. Morality or theories of false virtue stimulate them to manufacture cannon fodder, anthills of conscripts who are forced to sell themselves out of poverty. This improvident paternity is a false virtue, the selfishness of pleasure."
— Charles Fourier

"I do not believe that one can become rich without being a shark; a sensitive man will never amass wealth."
— Petrus Borel (Champavert, le lycanthrope)

"To get rich, one must have but a single idea, one fixed, hard, immutable thought: the desire to make a heap of gold. And in order to increase this heap of gold, one must be inflexible, a usurer, thief, extortionist, and murderer! And one must especially mistreat the small and the weak!
And when this mountain of gold has been amassed, one can climb up on it, and from up on the summit, a smile on one’s lips, one can contemplate the valley of poor wretches that one has created.
"
— Petrus Borel (Champavert, le lycanthrope)

"When giving money to the amputated, you must put it directly into their pockets."
— Greg Campbell (Blood Diamonds)

"In Paris there are two dens, one for thieves, the other for murderers. The den of thieves is the Stock Exchange; the den of murderers is the Courthouse."
— Petrus Borel (Champavert, le lycanthrope)

"I, on the other hand, interrupt people because my thoughts fly out of my mouth. My handbag's full of rubbish. And I want to do something that matters with my life. Right now I'd like to write plays, sing in musicals, and/or rid the world of poverty, violence, cruelty, and right-wing conservative politics."
— Alison Larkin (The English American: A Novel)

"It is the comfort of poverty, that our affections are valued, not our presents."
— Bishop Hall

"We must powder our wigs; that is why so many poor people have no bread."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

""I spend half my time comforting the afflicated, and the other half afflicting the comfortable." "
— Wess Stafford, President, Compassion International

"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)

"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)

"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)