Poor Quotations

Being a parent is weird. It changes people in subtle and unsubtle ways. In my case, it awoke a kind of manic sentinel in my brain. Anything in the house that might be a threat to the kids or to my wife gets terminated - food, sharp edges, poor wiring.

In countries with a properly functioning legal system, the mob continues to exist, but it is rarely called upon to mete out capital punishment. The right to take human life belongs to the state. Not so in societies where weak courts and poor law enforcement are combined with intractable structural injustices.

Weapons of mass destruction are the greatest threat to life on earth. Biological weapons are often called the poor man's atomic bomb. Saddam Hussein is the ruler who has for decades been making the most determined and diabolical illegal effort to acquire them.

Boys with a 'failure to launch' are invisible to most girls. With poor social skills, the boys feel anger at their fear of being rejected and self-loathing at their inability to compete.

They've got us surrounded again, the poor bastards.

With eye upraised his master's looks to scan, The joy, the solace, and the aid of man; The rich man's guardian, and the poor man's friend, The only creature faithful to the end.

The seminaries must be like the churches' poor relations, prolonging their existence with austerity.

I don't believe in nationalism. I think it's a bunch of slogans. It's a bunch of poor attempts at creating pride. My problem with nationalism is that it becomes exclusionary. We start to exclude people.

You are a dear soul who plays polo, and I am a poor Pole who plays solo.

The poor monkey, quietly seated on the ground, seemed to be in sore trouble at this display of anger.

The rich, by unfair combinations, contribute frequently to prolong a season of distress among the poor.

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.

I myself am from a very poor background; I experienced firsthand poverty in this country, and that is not unrelated to my desire, from the moment I became president, to make a priority of poverty reduction in this country.

We have no right to luxuries while the poor want bread.

It's not that we poor men are so powerful to be able to banish the devil. It's that God gives us the power.

I torture my mother with all my problems, that poor woman.

Mine has been a concern for the people, a concern to maintain stability, a concern to get people working together racially, ethnically, rich and poor - all segments of the city.

As a young child, I suffered from poor health. My parents encouraged me to swim, which really improved my condition.

I went to work in a woman's home in Los Angeles as a mother's helper. I worked there about two years. Went to school with all rich kids. I was the only poor kid in the school, and I was already insecure. But my voice saved me because I sang in school, and I was real popular because of my voice.

An economy growing at 7 percent per year, can and must find the resources to improve the lives of its millions of poor.

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

I come from a really poor family, and when I started doing campaigns, it changed everything for my family. I am not complaining; I had a beautiful childhood - we didn't have a lot of money, but there was always food on the table, and my parents saved money so that in the holidays we would all get in the car and drive to the mountains.

Saw a wedding in the church. It was strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition.

When I was seven we moved to Orpington, and in my new school, I was kept in for extra lessons to learn 'joined-up' writing instead of playing football. I still think that my poor handwriting and lack of soccer skills date from that period.

All the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The difference between our family and other poor families was that my mother actively chose to be poor. She was highly literate, and she had a college degree, but after my father left, she took the first secretarial job she could find and never looked for other employment again.

I think that there always have been and always will be at least two Americas - the poor America, the second America, tends to be in the shadows. Sometimes it's an America of people in a ghetto of color, sometimes it's an economic ghetto, but definitely there is a parallel America which people in the dominant America prefer to ignore if they can.

People say 'what do you mean' when you talk about 'bringing down civilization.' What I really mean is depriving the rich of the ability to steal from the poor and depriving the powerful of the ability to destroy the planet. That's what I really mean.

Poor is the man who does not know his own intrinsic worth and tends to measure everything by relative value. A man of financial wealth who values himself by his financial net worth is poorer than a poor man who values himself by his intrinsic self worth.

Therefore I do pray and entreat you in the name of Jesus Christ to do so much as to make my being here in Japan known to my poor wife, in a manner a widow and my two children fatherless; which thing only is my greatest grief of heart and conscience.

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.

Marie Stopes had established the first birth control clinic in Britain; the whole question of informing women, especially those who were poor, about methods of contraception, began to be discussed.

Poor air quality, which can be influenced by a variety of fumes, chemicals and allergens, is arguably the leading cause of triggers for most asthmatics in urban areas.

No other facet of American business is more corrupt, more intoxicated with illegality, more weakly regulated, and has a greater impact on poor and working people than debt collectors; not credit card companies or subprime mortgages, not even payday lenders.

I grew up poor in crappy situations... various crappy situations. What kept me sane was reading and music. I had so many different literary tastes growing up, be it fiction like Stephen King or Piers Anthony or non-fiction like reading Hunter S. Thompson essays or reading the Beats. I was a huge fan of the Beat movement.

George W. Bush was a silver spoon dolt with no record to speak of other than bankruptcy and selling tropical plants, and we let him sail into the White House, but Barack talks about religious fundamentalism and guns being prevalent in poor areas, and we roast him for weeks?

It's the rich you can terrorize. The poor have nothing to lose.

Poor is the power of the lead that becomes bullets compared to the power of the hot metal that becomes types.

I was raised by my grandmother on a farm, where we were really poor - we had dirt floors - but so did everybody else.

There's something really great and romantic about being poor and sleeping on couches.

If you want to help the poor and our next generation, make investment, reinvestment and businesses welcome.

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.

The South African government, unlike a lot of African governments, isn't poor.

As an explorer, I know firsthand there are many places in the ocean so full of life that they should be protected. Coral reefs and mangrove coastlines are stressed already by climate change and ocean acidification, and poor planning will just make their plight worse.

I believe that God and reality are too big for my poor words.

All the great Shakespeare plays are about killing. 'Alas, poor Yorick,' that's about death. And in 'Romeo and Juliet' everyone up ends up dying. The greatest dramas in the world are all about sex, violence and death.

I don't want to be the underdog. I don't want to be the poor guy, getting kicked around.

Being on the road is no excuse for having a poor diet. I don't like fast food, but if I have to, I'll order three plain grilled chicken sandwiches and throw out the buns.

Taxing poor families runs counter to decades of effort to help people lift themselves out of poverty through work.

A poor life this if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.

The best way poor people can come out of their poverty is to get on the global highway, not on some dirt side road.

Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich.

Everybody needs history but the people who need it most are poor folks - people without resources or options.

It is but a poor eloquence which only shows that the orator can talk.

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.

Bush is a very poor impromptu speaker. He does fine in small groups but when speaking without a script in front of large groups or answering questions he wasn't prepped for, he has problems.

If someone who is poor says, 'I may not have much money, but for me, what's really important is to have a good television so my family can enjoy and watch,' we should be a little careful and recognize that just like we all have individual liberty to make the choices we want, that we not judge too much on that.

The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense.

Traditionally the great men of our country have sprung from poor environments; that being so, it would appear we have long suffered from a severe lack of poverty.

The only violence was when these so-called 'freedom fighters' terrorized the poor Africans in the villages... They were told what to do and who to support.

Being poor with three small children is terrifying. You can't make any plans. You know you're not going on holiday, ever. There's no way you could ever afford driving lessons or a car. And the guilt I used to feel: they had holes in their shoes, and at one point, I had to send them to school wearing Wellingtons when the sun was shining.

I always wanted to be a boy scout but was too poor. Couldn't do it.

Contrary to popular belief. It's much wiser to take money from the poor than the rich.

He who bestows his goods upon the poor shall have as much again, and ten times more.

The rich don't exploit the poor. They just out-compete them.

Laissez Faire was very good sauce for the goose, labor, but was very poor sauce for the gander, capital.

Somebody has been cashing checks, and they've been bouncing back on us. And these people, the poor class of Negroes and the poor class of white people, they're getting tired of it.

I believe and I say it is true Democratic feeling, that all the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Whenever I travel to a poor country, I try to help at least one person. Usually, that person helps me just as much - I can find a local poor person to be my guide or my interpreter. That person makes money from me, I make money from him or her, we both learn about each other. It's an equal win-win relationship.

I don't know how the poor farmers deal with such situations in real life. It's really sad.

If you are born into poverty, the chances are good that your children will be born into poverty. Find a way to give poor kids the same cognitive stimulus that rich kids receive, and they should end up with the same tools for success.

I was distressed by the poor quality of the debate surrounding energy. I was also noticing so much green wash from politicians and big business. I was tired of the debate - the extremism, the nimbyism, the hair shirt. We need a constructive conversation about energy, not a Punch and Judy show. I just wanted to try to reboot the whole debate.

As a liberal, I am morally obligated to be pragmatic. What good do I do poor people, elderly people, people who are being discriminated against because of their sexual orientation if I'm not realistic about accomplishing something.

People can very quickly have a very poor self-image. It doesn't take much.

It's hard being black. You ever been black? I was black once - when I was poor.

The Christian Democrats always made you feel like the poor relation.

My mom was born poor, raised poor, and was going to die poor.

To love one person with a private love is poor and miserable: to love all is glorious.

The cosmic game changed forever in 1992. Before then, logic told us that there had to be other planets besides the nine (if you still count poor Pluto) in our solar system, but until that year, when two astronomers detected faint, telltale radio signals in the constellation Virgo, we had no hard evidence of their existence.

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.

Strange, to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and wife gazing and smiling at them.

I don't see why OPEC countries should continue to cut production just to keep the price of oil high. This will not affect the industrial countries alone, it will also hit poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Who will look after them?

He presented himself as the friend to Main Street America, and yet that aw-shucks persona ended up packaging policies and programs that were at times deeply injurious to the very people he swore to serve. After all, Reaganomics set in motion one of the largest wealth redistributions in American history, away from the poor and toward the rich.

When I was growing up in South Korea in the '70s and early '80s, the country was too poor to buy original records. Everything was bootlegged.

Poor countries are poor because they are wasting their resources,

A properly designed tax system can strike a balance between helping the poor and, at the same time, giving people the incentive to work.

What many economists fail to understand is that poor people are no less concerned about improving their lot and that of their children than rich people are.

Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.

My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child - one who sometimes asks me for stories of my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I have worked to make sure of that.

I grew up in a rural area, I was from kind of a poor family and my parents weren't showbiz people. But going back was strange, and perhaps stranger for the other students.

Throughout most of my life, I've tried to downplay my Chinese heritage because I wanted so much to be an American. I was the only Asian kid in my elementary school, and I longed to be like everyone else. I insisted on American food; I was embarrassed by my mother's poor English.

I don't buy into this, 'Oh, poor us. We've got tough budget problems.'

When we say 'less fortunate,' we generally mean the poor rather than the disabled, who actually are less fortunate. In truth, the poor are generally 'less fortunate' only in terms of genetics. They are certainly not less fortunate in the amount of help they receive.

In the end of five years I made supplication to the king to go out of this land, desiring to see my poor wife and children according to conscience and nature.

The poor prey on one another because their lives offer no hope and communicate the tragic message to these human beings that they have no possibility to attain a decent standard of living.

I'd seen my father. He was a poor man, and I watched him do astonishing things.

The endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society.

Success in life comes not from holding a good hand, but in playing a poor hand well.

I don't have a trainer. I have what I call 'the poor man's workout and the rich man's diet.' I run for 1 hour every day and do 500 sit-ups and 1000 crunches, and I lift weights at the Y for 28 bucks a month, even if it's 3 in the morning.

For humble individuals like myself, there is one poor comfort, which is this, viz. that gout, unlike any other disease, kills more rich men than poor, more wise men than simple.