Poverty is the schoolmaster of character.

Antiphanes

Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.

Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy¹ to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Frederick Douglass (1817 - 1895), Speech, April 1886

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

It is not the rich man you should properly call happy, but him who knows how to use with wisdom the blessings² of the gods, to endure hard poverty, and who fears dishonor worse than death, and is not afraid to die for cherished friends or fatherland.

Horace (65 BC - 8 BC), Odes

Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticized only by fools.

J. K. Rowling, Harvard Commencement Address, 2008

It is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails³ fear and stress and sometimes depression. It means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships.

J. K. Rowling, Harvard Commencement Address, 2008

Anyone who had ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

James Baldwin (1924 - 1987), Fifth Avenue Uptown: A Letter from

It is not easy for men to rise whose qualities are thwarted⁴ by poverty.

Juvenal (55 AD - 127 AD), Satires⁵

It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.

Kin⁶ Hubbard (1868 - 1930)

That is one consolation⁷ when you are poor—there are so many more things you can imagine about.

L. M. Montgomery (1874 - 1942), Anne of Green Gables, 1908

Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, and poverty of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.

Plato (427 BC - 347 BC), The Republic

To be poor and dependent is very nearly an impossibility.

William Cobbett (1763 - 1835), Advice to Young Men, 1829