The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to have any.
—Katharine Whitehorn
Poverty is not wholly a personal failure. It also represents the failure of an economic system. And the remedy is not wholly one of charity, but of political and economic action. Poverty is a reflection also on those who are not poor.
—Brooks Atkinson
If I were a Brazilian without land or money or the means to feed my children, I would be burning the rain forest, too.
—Sting
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships
—W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk
When you go to work, if your name is on the building, you’re rich. If your name is on your desk, you’re middle-class. If your name is on your shirt, you’re poor.
—Rich Hall
In my experience, middle-class Americans do not feel at ease around poor people. Even people of high ideals who care about the needy experience discomfort in the presence of the needy themselves.
—Rabbi Eliezer Finkelman
The rich are never threatened by the poor—they do not notice them.
—Marie de France
A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act; he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that “they” will never allow him to do this, that, and the other. Once when I was hop-picking I asked the sweated pickers (they earn something under sixpence an hour) why they did not form a union. I was told immediately that “they” would never allow it. Who were “they”? I asked. Nobody seemed to know, but evidently “they” were omnipotent.
—George Orwell
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
—Willem de Kooning
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
—Anatole France
The tax collector must love poor people, he's creating so many of them.
—Bill Vaughan
To be content with little is hard; to be content with much, impossible.
—Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
—G. K. Chesterton
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.
—Oscar Wilde
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
—Woody Allen