Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

Poverty is not a disgrace, but it's terribly inconvenient.

I know what poverty is.

There are far too many people who get up early in the morning, and work hard, who cannot make ends meet.

Poverty of course is no disgrace, but it is damned annoying.

I have always had a horror and detestation of poverty.

Poverty makes slaves of free men.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

My family in general - they're troubled or poorer people.

There's a real sense of desperation when you grow up in poverty.

I grew up poor.

I was born on the other side of the tracks, in public housing in Brooklyn, New York. My dad never made more than $20,000 a year, and I grew up in a family that lost health insurance. So I was scarred at a young age with understanding what it was like to watch my parents lose access to the American dream.

Like a lot of black people, I grew up straight po'. Wasn't no question about whether we was po', either. If you really wanted to know, all you had to do was look in our refrigerator.

The middle class has disappeared. We have a highway to poverty and no roads coming out.

Poverty demoralizes.

People who didn't know the depression just don't know what being poor means.

I was very poor when I was young.

We were poor, but we didn't know it. There were no government bureaus in those days presuming to determine where poorness begins and ends, but I don't remember ever being hungry.

My mom didn't have a lot of money.

I grew up in a household where my mom made $16,000 a year. I know the struggle. I know how to keep those things in perspective, and I do keep it into perspective.

What hurts me most is poverty, and that's what led me to become a rebel.

The inevitable consequence of poverty is dependence.

Complaint is poverty.

We were poor. we were so poor, in my neighborhood the rainbow was in black-and-white.

I was having trouble making ends meet, and my beginnings weren't meeting either.

I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty - they are not out on the street; they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata.