Jonathan Swift Quotes

Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.

It's hard to get people to empathize with the poor. You can get some people to sympathize with the poor, but to empathize is actually very hard, because most people are not poor. I realized that scarcity gives you a thread.

The rich don’t want the poor to get ahead of them.

When I was a young fellow I was very much disturbed by there being some people with lots of money and lots of people with no money.

God help the rich, the poor can look after themselves

Short of genius a rich man cannot even imagine poverty.

The biggest problem is that the rich people paying the bills do not share the same goals as the poor people they are trying to help. The wealthy have weak incentives to get the right amount of the right thing to those who need it; the poor are in no position to complain if they don’t.

Those of us who have been economically successful cannot forget those who have not.

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

Ignorant people are apt to overrate the value of what is called education. The sons of the poor, having suffered the privations of poverty, think of wealth as the mother of joy.

It is clear that the economy has not gotten better for everyone.

The central issue of our time remains the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer.

Hunger, the inseparable companion of the poor, is the offspring of the unequal distribution of the wealth and the injustices in this world. The rich do not know hunger.

He whose belly is full believes not him whose is empty.

The poor should not have to learn how to be frugal and the rich should not have to learn to be extravagant.

This contempt for money is a trick developed by the rich to keep the poor without it.

His position makes him one of the richest men in the world coming from one of the poorest countries of the world.

… perceptions of poverty have gone up because there’s been rising inequality.

Liberty is impossible if 36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.

There's more poor people in this country than there are rich, and I stick up for the poor people.

India happens to be a rich country inhabited by very poor people.

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.

I'm not a Mike Bloomberg billionaire.

In all the world, rich people are very unpopular.

The rich don't exploit the poor. They just out-compete them.