Subsistence Wage, Subsistence Living Quotes

What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. In so far as they fail, they receive the money; in so far as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.

I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave.

American and world history show that if you want minimal government, you can have it—but only if you want almost everyone in your society also to be a dirt-poor, subsistence farmer. If you want a prosperous, growing modern economy, you need high specialization and a huge, complex, interdependent network of individuals, businesses, research centers and education. And only government has the authority or money to regulate that network and to regularly pump in the targeted funds needed to sustain and grow it.

… there are a great many people who not only can make no budget but can barely manage to exist with their families on what they earn from day to day

The forgotten world is made up primarily of the developing nations, where most of the people, comprising more than fifty percent of the total world population, live in poverty, with hunger as a constant companion and fear of famine a continual menace.

Living on $6 a day means you have a refrigerator, a TV, a cell phone, your children can go to school. That's not possible on $1 a day.

People in the U.K. don't imagine what it is to live in extreme poverty here in Colombia or anywhere in the so-called Third World.

Take immediate and decisive steps to better the condition of the peasant. Abandon the system of war-time Communism by which we practically took from the peasant all his surplus, and sometimes what was not his surplus but part of his necessary subsistence.

Man's survival, from the time of Adam and Eve until the invention of agriculture, must have been precarious because of his inability to ensure his food supply.

I was living on a loaf of bread a week.

It was such a struggle for me to make it off welfare. I was getting $630 a month for myself and my children with no support from their fathers. The rent was $600 a month, and if you got a job, they took it out of your welfare.

A king of a large and fruitful territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day labourer in England.

Our people are unemployed and anxious to work for the food which foreigners can give us.

Political Economy regards the proletarian ... like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being.

When he [the Prophet Muhammed] died, his shield was being held in mortgage by a Jew. This was in the mutual interests of all those concerned. The Prophet (peace be upon him) had to buy things to fulfill the needs of himself and his family. The same sale was beneficial to the Jew who made the sale. Life does not operate on the basis of striving to deprive others of securing their welfare. It can only operate on the basis that our striving to secure our own welfare implies that others can secure theirs as well.

A plantation seems a fit place for those ingenious spirits that being low in the world, are much clogged and oppressed about a livelihood. For the means of subsisting being easy there, they may have time and opportunity to gratify their inclinations, and thereby improve science and help nurseries of people

A wandering family [in Ireland] will fix themselves under a dry bank and with a few sticks, furze, fern, etc,, make up a hovel much worse than an English pigsty, and support themselves how they can by work, begging, and stealing.

Instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.

There are very few people on welfare who like it.

I have heard of Texas pioneers living without bread or anything made from the cereals for months without suffering, using the breast-meat of wild turkeys for bread. Of this kind, they had plenty in the good old days when life, though considered less safe, was fussed over the less.

There are two billion fellow human beings who live on less than $2 a day.

The island is named Oooguruk, an Inupiaq word meaning 'bearded seal,' an animal plentiful on the shores of Alaska's North Slope.

What everyone has always wanted in this country, what most came here for, was to get away from all those others who smell bad, are sleeping in a shanty, and are eating fatback and are going to loaf tomorrow because there is no job to go to.

Welfare makes you dependent upon someone to take care of you.

Our Indian neighbors are advancing, many of them with spirit, and others beginning to engage in the pursuits of agriculture and household manufacture. They are becoming sensible that the earth yields subsistence with less labor and more certainty than the forest.