James Payn Quotes

People with lower incomes tend to give a greater percentage of their incomes to help others and show greater empathy and compassion - perhaps because they know they might face the same circumstances.

I know what it means to go to the stream to fetch water... what it means when people are poor and don't have enough to eat. It's not enough to say you know about poverty. You have to live it.

Growing up in inner-city Glasgow, it sometimes seemed to me money hadn't been invented.

I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people.

I started life in a poor family and could not even afford a proper tertiary education.

Poverty is not a trait of character. It is created anew in each generation but not by heredity, by circumstances.

They do not easily rise whose abilities are repressed by poverty at home.

You don't have to be impoverished to understand poverty.

In financial affairs and dealings with the state, those in the precariat are disadvantaged since they are usually less well-informed and have to do much more to satisfy demands made on them if they want to gain meagre state benefits.

The time when I had desire to go to the United States I didn't have a penny. It was in the middle of the depression, you know. I couldn't get as far as Hoboken at that time.

You and I can be busy, and we take a vacation from work. You can't take a break from being poor. You can't say, 'Hey I've had enough of worrying about money, I'm just going to be rich for a couple of weeks until I've recovered.'

It's difficult to write about poverty in a way that doesn't feel cliched.

It's very, very hard to be generous and compassionate if you haven't got a dollar in you back pocket to pay for it, to actually pay for those services that people need.

Short of genius a rich man cannot even imagine poverty.

The poor prey on one another because their lives offer no hope and communicate the tragic message to these human beings that they have no possibility to attain a decent standard of living.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

My mother, who graduated from high school at sixteen, had no hope of affording college, so she went to work in the local post office for a dollar a day. She was doing better than her father, who earned ten cents an hour working at a nearby grain elevator.

The total impact of the Tory/Liberal tax, welfare and public spending changes has hit the poorest 10% in society disproportionately hard - and women have been affected even more badly than men.

I lived for two years in an abandoned gas station with no running water and no electricity after my parents got divorced and my stepdad couldn't get a job. So I think a lot about families like mine who were middle class and struggled. So that experience really drives my philosophy.

Like everyone, I am formed by my background, and mine was - well, we didn't have a lot of money. I didn't live in a cardboard box, but I did live in a place where, at the end of the week, the money was gone.

When journalists and politicians speak of a dwindling middle class that's under economic assault and a poor community that's getting bigger, they're talking about Ferguson. Independent of the racial demographics and dynamics of Ferguson, Missouri, there's a 'Ferguson' near you.

I grew up in a council house in a poor Scottish town. I came of age during the recession of the mid-1980s when unemployment in my area reached 40 per cent.

How can a man help breaking the law when he don't have money to live on?

Where I came from, people couldn't afford to go to the theatre.

Back then, we didn't know we were poor, and people were more proud then.