Nancy Mitford Quotes

My father was a lorry driver, very rarely at home. The house was run by my mother, and because there were 10 or so kids, there was no time for individual attention. It was about survival. It was about where the next meal was coming from.

He is now rising from affluence to poverty.

Every day, families in the United States face the stark choice between a roof over their heads and food on the table. Buying health insurance, owning a home, and saving up for college are just too far out of their reach.

How can a man help breaking the law when he don't have money to live on?

My father made false teeth. Unfortunately, during the Depression, not many people could afford them, and my parents lost their home.

It's not hard to tell we was poor - when you saw the toilet paper dryin' on the clothesline.

Our poverty will be brought home to us to its full extent only after the war.

The middle class has disappeared. We have a highway to poverty and no roads coming out.

We were so poor that my mother would often leave me in a foster home until she could raise enough money to rent rooms for us.

I think the problem is that we Nigerians have yet to accept that we are now poorer than we used to be.

Independence feels like a luxury, where the reality is that it's hard to survive financially for so many people out there.

I never saw the light of day at Bouley. I remember I would bring home a roll of toilet paper a week because we got paid so little, if at all.

I'm proud that I've never stopped writing about being poor.

My generation could be the first in Hong Kong to be worse off than our parents.

There was a time when I just didn't have the opportunities, which meant going without things in my life - whether it was clothes, or food, or money - and living a really bare-bones life.

Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists...but it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.

Germany had the misfortune of becoming poisoned, first because of plenty, and then because of want.

The average net worth of the lower half of the distribution, representing 62 million households, was $11,000 in 2013. About one-fourth of these families reported zero wealth or negative net worth, and a significant fraction of those said they were "underwater" on their home mortgages, owing more than the value of the home. This $11,000 average is 50 percent lower than the average wealth of the lower half of families in 1989, adjusted for inflation.

Prosperity this Winter is going to be enjoyed by everybody that is fortunate enough to get into the poor farm.

God, how impossible life is without money. Nothing can ever overcome it, it's everything when it's anything. How can I write in peace with endless worries of money, money, money? (“Disappearing Act”)

Poverty became something one could see and experience firsthand, no matter where one was on the economic ladder; it became something you could viscerally experience through the lives of friends, family, neighbors, colleagues. I'd venture to say it's a rare person in 2013 America who knows nobody who lost a job in the recession, or knows nobody whose home went underwater or who went into foreclosure.

Poverty has a home in Africalike a quiet second skin.It may be the only place on earth where it is worn with unconscious dignity.

Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently. What supports its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery.

[The Goths'] poverty was incurable; since the most liberal donatives were soon dissipated in wasteful luxury, and the most fertile estates became barren in their hands.