Jeff Smisek Quotes

I'm tired of people on trust funds telling people on food stamps how to live.

Short of genius a rich man cannot even imagine poverty.

A poor man is a man who has not got much money. This may seem a simple and unnecessary description, but in the face of a great mass of modern fact and fiction, it seems very necessary indeed; most of our realists and sociologists talk about a poor man as if he were an octopus or an alligator.

I don't think it's good for people to be born into money and not know what it is never to have it.

Where I came from, people couldn't afford to go to the theatre.

My parents worked their tails off, but we weren't the poorest people in town. Some people I went to school with, you could tell they were dirt poor.

The rich don’t want the poor to get ahead of them.

God help the rich, the poor can look after themselves

…nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches, as to conceive how others can be in want.

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

I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.

If you don't have money or you come from a background that doesn't have money, it's harder to achieve your ambition in life. It's not that you can't, but it becomes harder. Inequality is one of the worst things that can exist in our society, so I am interested in those kind of things.

I identify with the bottom of the pyramid, because, outside of having money, I am at the bottom of the pyramid.

To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.

In all conditions of life a poor man is a near neighbor to an honest one, and a rich man is as little removed from a knave.

We talk of the enormous virtues of work, but it turns out that that is mostly for the poor. If you're rich enough or if you're a college professor, the virtue lies in leisure and the use you make of your leisure time.

Choice dependent on wealth; those are the Tory words.

Texas has arguably the most extreme separation between the well off and everyday people in the United States.

One of the strangest things about life is that the poor, who need the money the most, are the ones that never have it.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

Poor people have more fun than rich people, they say; and I notice it's the rich people who keep saying it.

Class - or the economic status of individuals - is evident in all societies, some very well stratified by a rigid caste system determined by birth.

I was poor. When you're poor you work, and when you're rich you expect somebody to hand it to you. So I think being reasonably poor is very good for people.

Money can't buy poverty.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.