A Quote by Polly Bergen

The interesting thing about me is that I was born poor, and I've lived rich and I've lived poor, and I know how to do both. People think rich is better. I don't know. — © Polly Bergen
The interesting thing about me is that I was born poor, and I've lived rich and I've lived poor, and I know how to do both. People think rich is better. I don't know.
Poor people know poor people, and rich people know rich people. It is one of the few things La Rochefoucauld did not say, but then La Rochefoucauld never lived in the Bronx.
I said I didn't think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes - better than the rich had ever lived, except that their lives would constantly be in danger from the hungry predatory poor. All the technology would serve the rich, but they would need it for their own protection and to assure their continued prosperity.
I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor...I truly believe that when the rich meet the poor, riches will have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end.
To put it quite crudely ... the poor don't really know how the rich live, and the rich don't know how the poor live, and to find out is really enchanting to both of them.
Growing richer every day, for as rich and poor are relative terms, when the rich are growing poor, it is pretty much the same as if the poor were growing rich. Nobody is poor when the distinction between rich and poor is destroyed.
That was always my experience-a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton .... However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.
Socially, I never belonged to any class, rich or poor. To the rich I was poor, and to the poor I was poor pretending to be like the rich.
Poor white people and poor black people just don't know how much they have in common. Rich people don't give a damn about either group.
I was pretty poor for a long time. Not *poor* poor. But college student poor. I lived for most of my adult life living on student wages, then after I got my MA and started teaching, I lived on teacher's wages, which isn't much better.
If the "rich" were swarming into poor neighborhoods and beating the poor until they coughed up the dimes they swallowed for safekeeping, yes, this would be a transfer of income from the poor to the rich. But allowing taxpayers to keep more of their money does not qualify as taking it from the poor - unless you believe that the poor have a moral claim to the money other people earn.
If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.
The rich...should beg the poor to forgive us for the bread we bring them. Healthy people sometimes feel they need to beg forgiveness too, although there is no reason why. Maybe we simply ask forgiveness for not being born where these poor women have been born, knowing that if we lived here too, our fate might well have been the same.
As recognized since ancient times, the coexistence of very rich and very poor leads to two possibilities, neither a happy one. The rich can rule alone, disenfranchising or even enslaving the poor, or the poor can rise up and confiscate the wealth of the rich.
Has it ever occurred to you, that the rich are at the mercy of the poor, not the poor at that of the rich? Who permits us to be rich if not the poor?
It is easy to say that there are the rich and the poor, and so something should be done. But in history, there are always the rich and the poor. If the poor were not as poor, we would still call them the poor. I mean, whoever has less can be called the poor. You will always have the 10% that have less and the 10% that have the most.
In a system of free trade and free markets poor countries - and poor people - are not poor because others are rich. Indeed, if others became less rich the poor would in all probability become still poorer.
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