Plato Quotes

If poverty makes man groan, he yawns in opulence. When fortune exempts us from labor, nature overwhelms us with time.

Give a beggar a dime and he'll bless you. Give him a dollar and he'll curse you for withholding the rest of your fortune. Poverty is a bag with a hole at the bottom.

If no man could become rich in Peru, no man could become poor.

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

As an anthropology major, I wanted to understand the cultural significance of poverty - why it exists and why some countries can rise above it while others can't.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck.

He that pines with hunger, is in little care how others shall be fed. The poor man is seldom studious to make his grandson rich.

It's easier to ask for money from the poor than from the wealthy.

Poverty hath slain a thousand, but riches have slain ten thousand. They are very uncertain, they promise that which they cannot perform, neither can they afford a contented mind.

You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.

The money I pay for my cultural experiences came willingly from my own pocket - they were not the result of bread being removed from the mouths of the poor so that Miss Thing here could mince off to the circus smelling of roses.

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

I think it's true that the 1 Percent or the elite are living in a world of, maybe, excessive privilege, and they don't fully realize how much pain and suffering, how much anxiety exists out there.

The issue of wealth inequality is ... the great moral issue of our time.

Everything must be in contrast at an affair like this. You know, to show anything off properly you must have the contrast. Now, I am here tonight representing poverty. We have enough wealth right here at this table, right here at the speaker's table alone---their conscience should hurt them, which I doubt if it does---so that we could liquidate our national debt. Every rich man reaches a time in his career when he comes to a turning point and starts to give it away.

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

No one should have more than five times the wealth of the poorest person.

The rich are few everywhere, the poor many.

The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, no worse, for a people than another.

... popular art has no chance of a healthy life, or, indeed, of a life at all, till we are on the way to fill up this terrible gulf between riches and poverty.

Actually, the problem in the world is that there is much too many rich people

Riches run after the rich, and poverty runs after the poor.

God help the rich, the poor can look after themselves

Every thing is moving and changing. Persons in poverty, are rising to opulence, and persons of wealth, are sinking to poverty.

…luxury is the result of wealth, or it makes wealth necessary. It corrupts both rich and poor, the one by possessing, the other by coveting. It sells out the fatherland to indolence and vanity; it deprives the State of all its Citizens by enslaving some of them to others and all of them to opinion.