Jonathan Ames Quotes

I was the kind of poor where I knew right away I had less than everyone around me. Our environment, our physical space reflected our income.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

We may feel the pain of falling back from a level of affluence to which we have grown accustomed, but most people in developed countries are still, by historical standards, extraordinarily well off.

The one class you do not belong to and are not proud of at all is the lower-middle class. No one ever describes himself as belonging to the lower-middle class.

Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known to be poor that is the sting.

Do you think we enjoy hearing about your brand-new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we're pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You'd last about ten minutes if you were my age these days.

I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty - they are not out on the street; they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata.

He is now rising from affluence to poverty.

When you talk about war on poverty it doesn't mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today.

When you look at guys who get recruited, most of the best athletes, they come from poor families. I don't forget. I was a junior looking through my mother's stuff and looked at her bank statement, and we had $30 in the bank.

Poverty affects people of all races.

My parents worked their tails off, but we weren't the poorest people in town. Some people I went to school with, you could tell they were dirt poor.

Money can't buy poverty.

The goatherds were the poorest people of Spain. Probably, they were the richest.

It's really hard to be poor in New York - I was really poor when I lived in New York.

I grew up with no money. No money. I always struggled and had the sense that there was this other class of people who went to college - this was when I was younger.

Like a lot of black people, I grew up straight po'. Wasn't no question about whether we was po', either. If you really wanted to know, all you had to do was look in our refrigerator.

I don't come from a rich family - it's not like we lived in a cardboard box, but we didn't have a ton of money.

I don't really believe in the myth of being poor but happy. At the poorest times in my life, I wasn't happy. I was just hungry.

Real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind.

The poorer is a family, the greater is the proportion of the total outgo which must be used for food... The proportion of the outgo used for food, other things being equal, is the best measure of the material standard of living of a population.

I don't come from money.

Like a lot of you, I grew up in a family on the ragged edges of the middle class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had a heart attack, my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our house.

Poverty is no disgrace, but it's no honor either.

The working poor is a growing population in this country.