Top 131 Poor People Quotes

If you’re in trouble, or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.

You can give poor people this royal wedding to watch and make them feel good about themselves, or you can give them something useful like, I don’t know… a toaster.

I was an anomaly because my father was a Harvard man, and he came from a family of poor people.

I have done a lot of work for affordable housing, rental housing. I understand the rap on me and other liberals is, oh, we push poor people into homeownership. And it’s exactly the opposite of the case. We were trying to prevent those kinds of bad loans.

Ours is not a poor country and even though we are now a poor people, there should be no room for the despondency that has settled on large sections of the population.

I have a question, a question for the president: Do you hate all rich people, or just rich people who don’t contribute to your campaign? Do you hate poor people or do you just hate poor people with jobs?

Civil rights leaders are involved in helping poor people. That’s what I’ve been doing all my life.

I’ve worked with and talked to poor people my entire life, being in the pawn shop business.

I like the back country, wildlife and all of that, but it’s wrong to force poor people to live that way.

Poor people don’t drive the toxic form of economic ‘growth’ that is destroying our environment.

My mother – she’s a good old classic Northern European socialist – she’s totally wonderful, but she raised me up believing that rich people have stolen their money from poor people.

Hip-hop is a voice for voiceless poor people.

Over the years, as I lived in low-income housing, collected government assistance, and lived well under the poverty level as I put myself through college, the comments people made about poor people started to sting. The poor are dirty. Hoarders. Their houses are a mess. Their kids are wild, untamed, and feral-looking.

Listen to the lyrics – we’re singing about everyday life: rich people trying to keep money, poor people tying to get it, and everyone having trouble with their husband or wife!

When poor people get involved in a long conflict, such as a strike or a civil rights drive, and the pressure increases each day, there is a deep need for spiritual advice. Without it, we see families crumble, leadership weaken, and hard workers grow tired.

To a billion people around the world surviving on just a dollar a day, the question of what to eat tonight is more about life and death than about recipes. The struggle of poor people around the globe weighs heavily on me, especially now that I am a mother, which is why I work with Oxfam.

We might be on the brink of an apocalypse if, instead of poor people with suicide bombs killing middle class guys, middle-class people with suicide bombs started killing rich guys.

When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.

Bill Cosby is a famous black guy who has a bully pulpit the size of the world; it’s global. He puts his colossal foot on the vulnerable necks of poor people, and as a result of that, we don’t have a balanced conversation.

From the depths of the West of Europe, a young child will be born of poor people, he who by his tongue will seduce a great troop; his fame will increase towards the realm of the East.

If there is an all India party in the country, it is the Congress. This is a party of poor people which believes in unity in diversity and which does justice to all.

We love wealth, and we hate poor people. I know people who work in TV news who have actually been told to do stand-ups rather than put interviews with poor people on the air. We physically don’t want to look at them.

The government is more responsive to wealthy communities than poor communities, and to wealthy people than poor people.

The way to turn our economy around is not by making rich people poorer, it’s by making poor people richer.

I get maximum satisfaction in seeing the happiness of poor people.

People who are rich find it hard to understand the behavior of poor people. Economists are no exception, for they, too, find it difficult to comprehend the preferences and scarcity constraints that determine the choices that poor people make.

The real purpose of welfare is to get rid of poor people entirely. Everybody knows welfare has bad effects; that’s the point.

I often think that people who write a lot about poverty need to go and spend more time with poor people.

We are privileged. There are poor people out there. We must to do something to make them privileged.

I don’t think people understand that being poor means you have to work from dawn until dusk just to survive through the day. I think there’s some notion that poor people lie about all day not doing anything.

I’ve always stood on one fact – that all over the world, there are only two things, the Establishment and the poor people. The poor people are a massive majority and across the world they are exploited in different kinds of ways. The Establishment depends on exploiting raw materials and the poor.

You know the funny thing, I don’t get along with rich people. I get along with the middle class and the poor people better than I get along with the rich people.

Libertarians know that a free country has nothing to fear from anyone coming in or going out – while a welfare state is scared to death of poor people coming in and rich people getting out.

It’s amazing how often campaigners in rich countries think poor people don’t get backache.

If poor people are spending their own money, it is amazing how fast they will figure out how to keep a lid on medical bills.

The first thing we should acknowledge is that poverty is hugely expensive. It varies from country to country, but most of the time it’s around 3, 4 or 5% of GDP. If you look at what it would cost just to top up the income of all the poor people in a country, it would cost about 1% of GDP.

To see poor people, their benefits being cut, to see pensions of Americans who have worked like my father, all their lives, and taken away, to see the rich just accumulating more and more wealth. I mean, it seems to me that there has to be a point where you have to say, ‘No, this has to stop.’

I had no idea that I would ever get involved with something like lending money to poor people, given the circumstances in which I was working in Bangladesh.

This nation has always struggled with how it was going to deal with poor people and people of color. Every few years you will see some great change in the way that they approach this. We’ve had the war on poverty that never really got into waging a real war on poverty.

Any industry where there’s a lot of money to be made and there are poor people involved, there’s going to be some exploitation on some level.

India happens to be a rich country inhabited by very poor people.

The more time I spent in developing countries, and the more time I spent talking to poor people, I realized what they want more than anything is a good job.

When you are running the country it means you work for the poor people. It doesn’t mean you siphon off money of disabled people. It does not mean you allot public property like coal for free to rich people.

All the United States, it is a society that is split like to the bottom, that had very poor people in the country that is one of the wealthiest countries.

There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.

It’s more important to try to do something for the crores of poor people of my country.

The number one person who needs my books is me. I’m not some sort of disinterested guru who has worked life out and is handing things out to the poor people who might not have life worked out.

You’ve got to gamble on yourself. If you don’t, no one else is going to. It’s very hard when you’re poor to turn down money. When you’ve got money, it’s easy. When you’re poor, you need money today. People take advantage of poor people.

Facebook brings the Internet to Africa and poor countries, but they’re only giving limited access to their own services and make money off of poor people. And getting government grants to do that, because they do PR well.

The tax collector must love poor people, he’s creating so many of them.

I worshipped money so much that it ruined my life. Money is not my god. I just want to manage His money for Him, for the poor people, the lost kids. I just love everybody.

People in Medicaid ought to have access to the same insurance as the rest of the population. If they are segregated, it will be a poor plan for poor people.

Sometimes, poor people don’t smell too good, so love can have no nose.

My Government has provided equitable access to benefits and facilities of its schemes for the poor people; of all religions and all regions, and has, thus, earned the trust of the people of the country.

I don’t think of myself as doing good works. It’s not, ‘Oh, I must give these poor people a voice.’

We need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people will die just because they are poor.

My idea for peace in the Middle East is to go back to the 1966 line, but to build even more houses for the Palestinians, who are a poor people.

For many of those who had historically supported welfare programs in the broadest sense, it was perfectly reasonable to enact legislation in which poor people were the objects of efforts to assist them.

I’ve found that a lot of successful poker players grew up poor. And I’m convinced that poor people have a risk tolerance that rich people don’t have because poor people fundamentally don’t value money that much because they’re used to not having it.

No one can say how long the process of human extinction might take, but as it proceeds, the same global order will prevail that always prevails: rich nations will find ways to protect themselves and make themselves comfortable, while the poor nations and the poor people of the planet will suffer.

Everybody wants to talk about black and white, when the situation is really about rich people against poor people.

People don’t like other poor people, and rather than blame the people that make you all poor, you blame each other.

What’s more condescending and corny than someone telling you how much more money they have than you and telling you basically, ‘I don’t care about poor people,’ which is a large part of what you hear of corporate hip-hop on the radio.

In my opinion, the Republican Party is the last on the list to care about the needs of old people and children and poor people.

We need to make sure middle-class people are able to pay the bills. We need to make sure that poor people don’t starve. Those are values, too.

I remember thinking Democrats and liberals were the good guys. They cared about the little guy. They cared about poor people. They cared about minorities.

In a system that disproportionately harms poor people and people of color, too many Americans have lost faith in the essential American principle of equal justice under law.

Neither one of the parties is doing anything for poor people. They’re both full of it. Black people have been voting Democratic their whole life, and they’re still poor. And the Republicans don’t do anything for poor people, either.

The facts of the fossil record never justified denying poor people a healthy diet. The facts of the weather record do not justify denying poor people affordable energy. And no set of facts, whatever they may be, can justify denying scientists – or anyone else, for that matter – the right to free speech.

I know this government is running in a three-wheeler like an autorickshaw, but for the poor people the steering is in my hand and the other two are sitting behind supporting.

Poor people are too stupid to know they’re just chess pieces in a game.

She was trusted and valued by her father, loved and courted by all dogs, cats, children, and poor people, and slighted and neglected by everybody else.

So many people for so many years have promoted technology as the answer to everything. The economy wasn’t growing: technology. Poor people: technology. Illness: technology. As if, somehow, technology in and of itself would be a solution. Yet machine values are not always human values.

Who is affected more when it’s cold? Poor people. Who is affected more when it’s hot? Poor people. Who is affected more when it’s wet? Poor people. Who is most affected when the economy is bad? Poor people. Poor people are the most fragile.

Technologies, including cell phones, have the potential to help millions of poor people out of poverty by enabling access to a range of safe, affordable financial services – most importantly, savings accounts – that have long been out of reach.

I was shocked when I came to New Orleans. I never knew there were beggars on the streets here. I didn’t know that there were poor people. I thought this was Heaven, you know?

The invention of the micro-loan was a big surprise to me. Who would have guessed loans of less than $20 made to poor people in undeveloped countries could create thriving local economies? And, even more surprisingly, that they more reliably pay off their debts than the wealthy of the world.

The power of the word in Morocco belonged to men and to the authorities. No one asked the point of view of poor people or women.

Prior to Katrina, the South Bronx and New Orleans’ Ninth Ward had a lot in common. Both were largely populated by poor people of color, both hotbeds of cultural innovation: think hip-hop and jazz. Both are waterfront communities that host both industries and residents in close proximity of one another.

If you go back in American history, oysters were the food of poor people. New York was filled with oyster saloons in the 1800s.

Modern elites live in bubbles of liberal affluence like Ann Arbor, Brookline, the Upper West Side, Palo Alto, or Chevy Chase. These places used to have impoverished neighborhoods nearby, but the poor people got chased out by young singles living in group homes, hipsters, and urban homesteading gay couples.

It is plain that we don’t care about our poor people except to exploit them as cheap labor and victimize them through excessive rents and consumer prices.

In a sane, civil, intelligent and moral society, you don’t blame poor people for being poor.

America doesn’t have poor people, they have temporarily embarrassed millionaires: meaning there are people who are poor for now but that’s all about to end when ‘blank’ happens, or when the number comes in, or when the invention takes off.

A calling is you feel – you look out and see the need – maybe it’s the need for the poor, to help poor people. Maybe it’s the need to get involved in the race problem, as Martin Luther King was – felt called.

Most of the people in the world are poor, so if we knew the economics of being poor, we would know much of the economics that really matters. Most of the world’s poor people earn their living from agriculture, so if we knew the economics of agriculture, we would know much of the economics of being poor.

In Asia, we live within our means. So when we are poor, we live as poor people. I think that is a lesson that Europe can learn from Asia.

Nobody likes being around poor people, especially poor people.

God is close to the brokenhearted, and God lifts up the lonely. That was a message that was explicitly quoted to me and was part of my upbringing: Brokenhearted people and poor people and people who are in trouble should be your focus, and you should be on their team.

We used to say poor people had lousy genes. Then we decided that wasn’t OK, but we transferred the prejudice to upbringing. We said, ‘You were neglected as a child, so you’ll never make it.’ That’s just as pernicious.

The Dominican is a real nice place to go for vacation. It is a poor country, but it has another side. Beautiful beaches. It’s like every country. You’re going to have a lot of poor people, but there’s a beautiful side, too.

It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people yourself is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral, self-righteous, bullying laziness.

Why do elites hate the poor? It’s xenophobia. They don’t know any poor people – except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don’t speak English.

Candidates don’t want to be associated with poor people, people who have jobs or are ugly; they want to be associated with a certain middle class demographic, so as a result they leave those others out completely.

If it is the choice between a bullet train and a three-wheeler, I will choose the latter as it is the traveling mode of the poor people.

Irrespective of economic theories, we will take decisions in the larger interest of the poor people.

Poor people are those who only work to try to keep an expensive lifestyle and always want more and more.

I don’t like laughing at people unless they’re in a privileged position or if they’re in authority. If it’s poor people or people who live on the outskirts or on the margins, or the underdog, I’d rather be laughing with them.

In my experience, poor people are the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. Every day, they must innovate in order to survive. They remain poor because they do not have the opportunities to turn their creativity into sustainable income.

I believe in the Democratic party, and their philosophy and what they stand for – for the poor people.

Poor people put a low value on themselves and their efforts.

I think clever people think that poor people are stupid.

Overall, female scientists have fewer resources than male scientists, just as poor people have less access to health care. But if you compare male and female scientists with identical resources, you find that the women are just as likely to be successful.

The medical protocol for poor people is, if something hurts, get over it. If something hurts real bad, put salve on it.

I wanted to raise the voice of a lot of the people that I knew growing up, and this was, for the most part, poor people who had extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles.

Poor people can’t cut their emissions – they don’t make them.

We’ve learned a huge amount from organisations like Seva Mandir and Pratham, for example. In my personal experience, these organisations work on a very large scale with very poor people.

Historically, industrial revolutions haven’t been kind to poor people. Despite the potential benefits technology can offer, the immediate impact on the lowest-paid members of society has often been negative.

I began my career as an economics professor but became frustrated because the economic theories I taught in the classroom didn’t have any meaning in the lives of poor people I saw all around me. I decided to turn away from the textbooks and discover the real-life economics of a poor person’s existence.

Poor people, people of color – especially are much more likely to be found in prison than in institutions of higher education.

You must do as your people do. If my people are poor, I must be poor. People ask me, ‘Why don’t you find a personal coach or a private car?’ I can’t. Then I won’t be part of my people.

My perspective is never gonna change on that… We’ve got to do a much better job to take care of poor people, because you cannot put all the poor people in bad neighborhoods, send them to bad schools, and say, ‘Good luck in life.’ That’s just not right.

China has many successful entrepreneurs and business people. I hope that more people of insight will put their talents to work to improve the lives of poor people in China and around the world, and seek solutions for them.

I come from the poor people, and I have been here working my whole stinkin’ career for people who don’t have a chance, and I really resent anybody that says I’m doing it for the rich. Give me a break.

One thing that struck me in my study of history is how people are excluded. I don’t mean just racial minorities or women. Pretty much all poor people who don’t have documents are excluded from history and its records. People who were illiterate usually didn’t leave any primary documents.

We decided in the mid-1960s that all poor people are the same: they are all poor. We know they’re poor because we have defined a poverty line, and they’re all underneath it.

If you look at the world’s top 50 drugs being sold today, they are being marketed and sold by companies that did not invent them. I respect patents. I’ll pay a royalty. But I shouldn’t be denied the right to produce drugs for poor people at reasonable prices.

To see those babies with no food for three of four days, old people sitting in the hot sun, when you see these poor people, you cannot help but being compassionate or affected.

Brazil is a country that has rich people, as you have in New York City, as you have in Berlin or in London. But we also have poor people like in Bangladesh or in African suburbs.

This is not a country that has had a tremendous sympathy for poor people, so I think that the notion that somehow we have slipped into an era in which poor people don’t matter is not quite the way our history would define it.

I will continue to find ways to help poor people find a job, get a job, and learn someday to own the job.

Being Christian towards poor people means trying to improve their lives and give them back some self-respect.

I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn’t touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.

When Superstorm Sandy churned up fourteen-foot walls of water that slammed New York’s coastal communities in October 2012, they also washed away any false notions we had that we care sufficiently for poor people.

Bonuses balance my budget in New York City. The bigger the bonuses on Wall Street, the more money I had to spend on poor people. The New York City budget is determined greatly by the bonuses given on Wall Street.

I founded Samasource because I was frustrated by traditional approaches to poverty alleviation. Even those approaches focused on jobs often equip poor people with skills for which there is little market demand.

If you want to leave move money in the hands of poor people, you cannot do it through personal income tax cuts. You have to just give them money.

Societies tend to presume that poor people are unable to handle money. If they had any, people reason, the poor and homeless would probably spend it on fast food and cheap beer, not on fruit or education.

Creative new health strategies like micro-insurance for poor people or Kangaroo care for pre-term babies are transforming health outcomes in even the most low-resource settings. Dedication and innovation are transforming health care worldwide.

Most Americans think that public health is services for poor people, and since most Americans hate poor people and want all poor people’s services destroyed, they hate public health.

You know, I love all kinds of activism. I certainly think blacks deserve to have something whether it is affirmative action or an opportunity that should be opened up to them. But at the same time I believe that people of color are not the only poor people in America and all over the world.