Poverty

“ This very sentiment, which our cultivation refines, fosters, makes supreme, is encountered by that harsh and cruel evil which grows also with the growth of civilization—poverty—civilized poverty. Oh, 'tis a frightful thing, this well-born, well-bred poverty! There is a pauper state, which, loathsome as it is to look upon, yet brings with it a callousness to endure all inflictions, and a recklessness that can seize with avidity whatever coarse fragments of pleasure the day or the hour may afford. But this poverty applies itself to nerves strung for the subtlest happiness. ”

“ Now there is a tendency in poverty to drive the ablest men to work, and so get rid of the poverty, and this I take it is the providential design thereof. Poverty, like an armed man, stalks in the rear of the social march, huge and haggard, and gaunt and grim, to scare the lazy, to goad the idle with his sword, to trample and slay the obstinate sluggard. ”

“ This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times. It is the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and education grapple in vain. ”

“ I replied, "how it was possible that this country could ever have been cursed with poverty as the normal condition of the masses of the people while the few were rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and held those masses bound by fetters that they could not break." ”

“ You hear a good deal about poverty nowadays, and the cry goes up to abolish poverty, but it will be the saddest day of civilization when poverty is no longer with us. It is from the soil of poverty that all the virtues spring. ”

“ Perhaps the chains of poverty hang heavily upon you, and you are friendless and alone, and you long with an intense longing that your load may be lightened; but the load continues, and you seem to be enveloped in an ever-increasing darkness. ”

“ Is there not poverty to be remedied, pain to be alleviated, ignorance to be removed? The reformer has yet something to inspire his fervid soul; the philanthropist plenty to touch his generous heart. Why even now the wealthy rogue struts pompously upon the stage of life in grand attire, and fares sumptuously every day; while honest poverty in rags lies hungry and fainting at his door. ”

“ Fortunately poverty was no new experience for him; still, poverty confronted alone, in a great city, must have seemed something grimmer to the home-bred lad than that mother-interpreted poverty, which he had hitherto known. ”

“ We are told that 'the poor shall never cease out of the land;' and can poverty exist unattended by its consequent evils? Would it not, on our part, be a profitable exercise, were we sometimes to leave our warm fireside, during the inclemency of the weather, and visit the huts and cottages of the poor, to examine for ourselves how they are clad, and how they are warmed and fed? ”

“ It is so with the rich, doubtless, and it may be so with the poor who were born in this poverty; but to the well-born and well-educated, to the refined and intellectual, poverty is a dreadful, dreadful thing. ”

“ All that poverty—poverty of invention, poverty of craft—is the product of a false ideal of possession, false to human nature, because quite obviously a cause of deterioration to those visible proofs of man's well-being—the joyous labour of his hand and brain. ”

“ Why should the "quiver" of poverty be so very full? one asks as one looks at the swarms of gentle, naked, old-fashioned children, born to a heritage of hard toil, to be, like their parents, devoured by vermin, and pressed hard for taxes. ”

“ Instead of that hideous, importunate, idle, licentious poverty, as pernicious to the police as to morality, we should see the poverty of the earlier ages, humble, modest, frugal, robust, industrious, and laborious. ”

“ Now I am not going to deny that poverty, like other forms of suffering, plays a part in the economy of the human race. If God's children will not work, or will throw away their bread, I do not complain that He sends them to bed without their supper—to a hard bed and a narrow and a cold. ”

“ That one half the world knows not how the other half lives, is a common and just observation;—complaints and murmurs are frequent I find among those of the inhabitants of this highly favoured country, who are not only blessed with the liberty and means of procuring for themselves and their families, the necessaries and comforts, but even many of the luxuries of life!—they complain of poverty, and yet never knew what it was to be really poor! ”

“ There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes, in all the towns and streets of Europe. Poverty, therefore, is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. ”

“ What is it but to wear coarse cloaths, to feed on plain and simple fare, to work and take some pains, to sit or goe in a lower place, to have few friends and not one flatterer? And what great harm in this? If I had time to compare it with the many dangers and temptations to which wealth is expos'd,—pray consider that poverty is a state which many have born with great chearfulness. Many wise men have voluntarily embrac'd it. ”

“ Be it the poverty which galls (and remember that the poverty upon which I have been dilating is that poverty which is a source of misery, and not that voluntary poverty which is the glory of emancipated souls) , or the riches which burden, or the many misfortunes, griefs, and annoyances which form the dark background in the web of life, you may overcome them by overcoming the selfish elements within which give them life. ”

“ Summing up, it is convenient to classify the causes of [267] poverty as individual and social, including under the first head ignorance, inefficiency, illness or accident, intemperance, and immorality, and under the second unemployment, widowhood, or desertion, overcrowding and insanitation, the high cost of living versus low wages, and lack of adjustment to environment.
Poverty is one of those social conditions that appear in all parts of the country, even in the smaller villages, but it is more dreadful and wide-spread in the great cities. ”

“ The poverty of the incapable, the distress that comes upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and the shouldering aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many 'in shallows and in miseries,' are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence. ”

“ That degree of poverty which involves in it the inability to procure the necessaries of life without the charitable assistance of the Public, is, doubtless, the heaviest of all misfortunes; as it not only brings along with it the greatest physical evils, pain,—and disease, but is attended by the most mortifying humiliation, and hopeless despondency. ”

“ Then, if we had a little bread to eat we should be happy and contented, and in our poverty we would be willing to divide with and assist our poor brethren and sisters, and help to save them from starvation. But now the cry is, "I have a house, and I want my furniture! I have a farm, I want my teams and my wagons, and then I want a carriage and time to ride," until the whole world is swallowed up by the few. ”

“ This attitude of the poor toward poverty tends to increase it, to aggravate their disease. So long as one holds the poverty thought he is making himself a poverty magnet, and continually drawing to himself unfortunate conditions. ”

“ POVERTY The Meaning of Poverty—Personal and General Causes—Poverty in a Prosperous Society Due Chiefly to Maladjustment—Are the Poor the “Unfit”?—Who is to Blame for Poverty?—Attitude of Society Toward the Poor—Fundamental Remedies.
The most practical definition of poverty is that now widely adopted which relates it to function, and calls those the poor whose income is not sufficient to keep up their health and working efficiency. ”

“ Where the conditions to which material progress everywhere tends are most fully realized—that is to say, where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed—we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most of enforced idleness. ”

“ All these dwellings, it may be added, do not wear the same aspect of prosperous neatness; but even where poverty is present, it is unaccompanied by that sullen gloom and melancholy squalidness which, in other countries, is the painful indication and result of long-endured privation. And here, we must also remember, poverty and famine are not always inseparable companions. ”

“ The poor should learn more of the cares, responsibilities, unrecorded charities, and absorbing worries of the rich; the rich should learn more intimately the sorrows, privations, struggles, and despair of poverty. ”

“ I mean the man, who, when the distant poor
Need help, denies them nothing but his name.
But poverty, with most who whimper forth
Their long complaints, is self-inflicted woe; 430
Th' effect of laziness or sottish waste. ”

“ Let it be eternally borne in mind, that if intemperance and other vices produce poverty on the one hand—poverty, degrading and remediless poverty on the other, as often produces recklessness, intemperance, and their baleful concomitants. ”

“ But I am sure that the poor man's dignity and freedom, his self-respect and energy, depend upon his cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true region and kind of life, with its own chances of character, its own springs of happiness and revelations of God. ”

“ Did I ever tell you this? The poor, they are despised for being poor, and they are let to suffer. Here poverty is not permitted. If a man lose his dwelling by fire, the town builds him another house. You know this. ”

“ Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children: they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty; they think of the word only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation. ”

“ What then is the principal cause why, as things are now, such lamentable poverty and such huge fear of lamentable poverty dominate the human situation? The cause is not far to seek. It lies in the very root and ground of our existing commercial and industrial system. ”

“ So that poverty is, except where there is an actual want of food and raiment, a thing much more imaginary than real. The shame of poverty, the shame of being thought poor, is a great and fatal weakness, though arising, in this country, from the fashion of the times themselves. ”

“ Turning to the treatment of poverty in fact, it is surely not altogether fanciful to think that we can trace a similar development,—the march of the plain and common people into the foreground of the charitable consciousness. ”

“ Examine this, my dear children: in all time of our tribulation,—that is in poverty and distress, and perhaps famishing from want (and in few positions are people so incited to crime) , then in all time of our wealth, evidently and distinctly placing wealth as more dangerous to the soul’s welfare than the extremest poverty and its accompanying temptations ”

“ Added to this is their poverty, which makes it necessary for them to accept whatever work with whatever wages they can get. "The destruction of the poor is their poverty," according to the old proverb. ”

“ Let it sound as paradoxical as it may,—I do not say it unadvisedly,—poverty is an enrichment, and often enough a grandeur. Here, indeed, in this fact—I think it by no means unlikely—may lie the explanation of many a humorously high behavior and lordliness in those of whom I have more particularly told. ”

“ Is it good to be content with poverty? Nay, 'tis better far to investigate the cause of such poverty, with a view to its cure and prevention. The doctrine is a most horrid one which declares that the poor shall not cease from the face of the earth. ”

“ The arrangements of the circumstances of the people must be such that poverty shall disappear, and that every one as far as possible, according to his position and rank, shall be comfortable. Whilst the nobles and others in high rank are in easy circumstances, the poor also should be able to get their daily food and not be brought to the extremities of hunger. ”

“ As covetousness is the root of all evil, so poverty is, I believe, the worst of all snares. ”

“ I have given the above as a special instance of the contention that poverty is a complex, including a number of elements, and that it is our duty to ascertain in each area by careful local inquiry what are these constituent elements, and if practicable their relative weight; and then to apply the most urgently needed remedies, not contenting ourselves with the relatively useless generalisation that the evils we see are ascribable to poverty. ”

“ Better poverty without care, than riches with. ”

“ The farmer may be muscle-bound and stooping from his labor; but that does not account for his dyspepsia or his rheumatism.
Then we allege poverty as covering all. Poverty does cover a good deal. But when we find even a half-fed savage better developed than a well paid cashier; and a poor peasant woman a more vigorous mother than the idle wife of a rich man, poverty is not enough. ”

“ Know, O Lord, that thy subjects and servants suffer a sore poverty that cannot be told of more than that it is a sore poverty and desolateness. The men have no garments, nor the women, to cover themselves with, but only rags rent in every part, that let the wind and cold in. ”