Plato Quotes

The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt.

When I was a child, I didn't fly - we couldn't afford to fly. Flying was for rich people.

About the only difference between the poor and the rich, is this, the poor suffer misery, while the rich have to enjoy it.

Kids from poor families might be nicer, the might be happier, they might be more polite---but in countless ways, the manner in which they are raised puts them at a disadvantage in the measures that count in contemporary American society.

… mankind will no longer passively submit to crushing poverty with its effects of death, disease, and decline.

Poor children fare worse than rich children on just about everything that social scientists measure.

Poverty is a soft pedal upon all branches of human activity.

The events of the time may be transmitted to posterity; but the agitation of the public mind can never be fully comprehended but by those who were witnesses of it

Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood.

Rich people are the experimental ground for every new development. The nature of progress is that what begins as a luxury for the rich becomes a necessity for the poor as it's developed and passed on.

Anyone, without any great penetration, may distinguish the dispositions consequent on wealth; for its possessors are insolent and overbearing, from being tainted in a certain way by the getting of their wealth. For they are affected as though they possessed every good; since wealth is a sort of standard of the worth of other things; whence every thing seems to be purchasable by it.

I'm not sticking up for white kids - I'm going to have a barrage of hate mail - but it's true. If you're poor, you're really poor.

To blame the poor for subsisting on welfare has no justice unless we are also willing to judge every rich member of society by how productive he or she is. Taken individual by individual, it is likely that there's more idleness and abuse of government favors among the economically privileged than among the ranks of the disadvantaged.

The poor man with industry is happier than the rich man in idleness.

The middle class in the rich countries is where the political game is being played. They are voting in elections in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany. They are working people in the upper part of the global income distribution. They might on average be happy that the Chinese are doing well, but they are not happy that the Chinese are doing well relative to them.

You've got first-generation Americans here who are going to be poorer than their parents. That's never happened in the States before, and it's going to have massive social repercussions here.

The intergenerational poverty that troubles us so much today is predominantly a poverty of values.

We all either work for rich people or we sell stuff to rich people, so just punishing rich people is as bad for the economy as punishing anyone. Let's not punish anyone.

I will tell you one other thing about money: when you don't have it, it sure as hell affects the quality of people's health, and their relationships. And paper money isn't even real today, right? It's all really ones and zeros in computers today. But at the same time, if you don't have it, it certainly affects the quality of your life.

The millionaires are a product of natural selection ... the naturally selected agents of society for certain work. They get high wages and live in luxury, but the bargain is a good one for society.

Among the lessons taught by the French revolution, there is none sadder or more striking than this--that you may make everything else out of the passions of men except a political system that will work, and that there is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated into dogma.

Poor people have been voting for Democrats for the last 50 years and they're still poor.

Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.

Poverty is so significant that we can't expect to overcome the impacts of poverty in schools.

The true friend of the people should see that they be not too poor, for extreme poverty lowers the character of the democracy.