Ralph Waldo Emerson 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.

It is easy to say that there are the rich and the poor, and so something should be done. But in history, there are always the rich and the poor. If the poor were not as poor, we would still call them the poor. I mean, whoever has less can be called the poor. You will always have the 10% that have less and the 10% that have the most.

The rich are never as possessed by their riches as the poor are by their poverty.

Poverty is, except where there is an actual want of food and raiment, a thing much more imaginary than real. The shame of poverty--the shame of being thought poor--it is a great and fatal weakness, though arising in this country, from the fashion of the times themselves.

Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.

I don't understand how poor people think.

Poor people who had escaped from poverty as I had, feared it, hated it and fled from it all their lives. Those born rich could afford to be touched by it.

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

Very few people can afford to be poor.

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

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.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

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

The poverty one still sees in America today is more shocking to me than anything I have seen in Ethiopia or Calcutta or Manila, and has made me, as someone living in a society of great wealth and someone who's never had to worry about the next meal, think seriously about what universal responsibility really means.

In middle-income countries, inequality becomes a problem because you can see there is a layer of people who are doing well, while the poor are still stuck there.

What many economists fail to understand is that poor people are no less concerned about improving their lot and that of their children than rich people are.

Coming from where I came from, it was unimaginable to ever be wealthy. That was just too far out of my reach.

It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.

Never forget that there are rich people in poor countries and poor people in rich countries.

The poor generally follow behavior patterns established by the rich.

There are only two families in the whole world, my old grandmother used to say, The Haves and the Have-Nots.

I'm tired of people on trust funds telling people on food stamps how to live.

The one think I hate about rich people, is that they really think that they work harder than poor people.

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