Ibn Sa'id Quotes

Money is just the poor man's credit card.

By desiring little, a poor man makes himself rich.

Nowadays nothing but money counts: a fortune brings honors, friendships; the poor man everywhere lies low.

There's a lot of freedom in having nothing. You don't have responsibility. You have nobody to answer to. But I'd rather deal without the poverty.

I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money.

To help the poor to a capacity for action and liberty is something essential for one's own health as well as theirs: there is a needful gift they have to offer which cannot be offered so long as they are confined by poverty.

Wealth makes many friends; but the poor is deserted by his neighbor.

Dignity and plenty instead of humility and poverty.

He is rich enough who has no wants.

Confidence in the future -- Hope -- gives power to individuals and communities. It is that which enables the poor man to become rich, and the character of all legislative action is to be judged by its greater or lesser tendency to produce this effect.

I am not preoccupied about my future.

I had no direction. But now I can afford to have no direction.

Societies tend to presume that poor people are unable to handle money. If they had any, people reason, the poor and homeless would probably spend it on fast food and cheap beer, not on fruit or education.

Wealth does not trickle down to the poor. Oxfam knows this, the IMF knows this, the World Bank knows this. Poor people have always known this.

Labour parades compassion for the poor, but it practised casual cruelty by consigning millions to benefits. Yet there's nothing compassionate about being trapped on benefits, being robbed of the dignity of work, and shut out from the choices that brings.

I don't want my kids to live like I do, sweating in a little metal box. I want them to have sunshine. I want them to have light.

I think I have got comfort, beautiful kids; I can do whatever I want, travel around the world... I know it's sounding very materialistic, but it's been a comfortable life.

If I'm blessed enough to have financial freedom in this world, my family is the ones I owe thanks to first.

Money is power, freedom, a cushion, the root of all evil, the sum of blessings.

In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society.

Nothing so denies a person liberty as the total absence of money.

While economic development [in Egypt] made a few people rich, it left many more worse off. As people felt less and less free, they also felt less and less provided for.

Poverty, we may say, surrounds a man with ready-made barriers, which if they do mournfully gall and hamper, do at least prescribe for him, and force on him, a sort of course and goal; a safe and beaten, though a circuitous, course. A great part of his guidance is secure against fatal error, is withdrawn from his control. The rich, again, has his whole life to guide, without goal or barrier, save of his own choosing, and, tempted, is too likely to guide it ill.

War is not the only form of violence imposed on people through inadequate social arrangements. There is also hunger, poverty and scarcity. The use of money and the creation of debt fosters economic insecurity, which perpetuates crime, lawlessness and resentment. Paper proclamations and treaties do not alter the facts of scarcity and insecurity, and nationalism tends only to propagate the separation of nations and the world's people.

I am a freeman and jolly as a beggar.