Chet Atkins Quotes

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.'

I have a poverty demon. I'll ask my accountant if I can afford something, and he'll say, 'What are you talking about?'

I have way more experience being poor than I do having money.

I never felt poor. Our family euphemism was that we were broke, which I think psychologically gave you a different feeling. There were people far worse than we were.

No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

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.

Poverty itself is not so bad as the poverty thought. It is the conviction that we are poor and must remain so that is fatal.

My mom didn't have a lot of money.

I didn't grow up in the slums or anything that dire, but I know what it is to grow up without having money or being able to support family.

For a good part of my childhood, we were super poor and lived in government housing. I don't characterize the American dream as being successful and having a lot of material wealth to show for it. I did fine without it for a really long time.

The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.

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.

Poverty of course is no disgrace, but it is damned annoying.

Footage of people camped out at Best Buy or elsewhere is not remotely a celebration. Rather, it's a reminder of just how economically distressed a large percentage of our populace is.

There is nothing worse than being ashamed of parsimony or poverty.

There's not much money in Tallahassee. Not many people can leave Tallahassee because they don't have the means.

We had plenty of clothes and no money.

In Latin America, you don't do things for the money because there is no money.

You know, my Grandpop Finnegan used to have an expression: he used to say, 'Joey, the guy in Olyphant's out of work, it's an economic slowdown. When your brother-in-law's out of work, it's a recession. When you're out of work, it's a depression.'

Maybe poverty is a special case of something else. That something else is 'scarcity,' and anyone who has the experience of 'having very little' experiences the same psychology.

After we were married, we were broke. Flat broke. Not only did we not have health insurance, we could barely keep a roof over our heads, let alone have the kind of coin to throw around on onesies and Pampers.

We've all got to get away from this idea that the big money's still around.

What fun it would be to be poor, as long as one was excessively poor! Anything in excess is most exhilarating.

Poverty us no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.